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The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

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The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

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Content THE CURIOUS LIFE OF THE CORPSE IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE by Alicia María Garnica A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2009 Copyright 2009 Alicia María Garnica ii Table of Contents Abstract iii Introduction 1 Chapter One 23 Chapter One Endnotes 92 Chapter Two 97 Chapter Two Endnotes 148 Chapter Three 153 Chapter Three Endnotes 212 Chapter Four 217 Chapter Four Endnotes 270 Bibliography 274 iii Abstract This project is an investigation of the ways in which early to mid-nineteenth- century culture understood the paradoxical dead body. For survivors in the nineteenth century, the dead body had several potential post-mortem lives. It could make death soothing or frightening, serve as a means to control social behavior, alleviate disease, and serve justice. I argue that men and women developed narratives that defined a corpse’s possible post-mortem trajectories, meanings, and uses. Together, these narratives compose a social history—the life of the corpse in nineteenth-century culture—played out in the realms of the novel, law, medicine, and politics. Each narrative is a hybrid of discourses that both constructed and criticized it; in all cases, novels assess the corpse narratives and present alternative solutions often available only in the realm of fiction. While each faction agreed that what the living did with the dead affected the impact of death and the corpse on survivors, they did not agree with one another about the nature of that impact, nor what should be done with the dead. Nonetheless, all narratives endeavored to exert some control over death by managing the corpse. By properly managing the dead body, the narratives’ proponents argued, the living can make death less fearful or decrease its incidence. The first chapter’s subject is industrial novels’ critique of the good death narrative. The second chapter investigates the impure corpse in the medical-sanitarian narrative of the 1830s and 1840s and offers a social history of the corpse out of which emerges a narrative of social control enacted on the bodies of the poor. Situated within the context of the battle for control over the underclass dead body during the 1820s and 1830s, the third chapter investigates the trio of intertwined and iv mutually dependent narratives that sprung up around the body-to-be-dissected. Finally, the fourth chapter investigates how the Victorian inquest endeavored to produce a narrative of the body’s death, and how novels question the inquest’s ideals, criticize its several failings, and offer the novel’s narrative as the ultimate solution in telling the dead’s tale. 1 Introduction I have been fascinated and repelled by the corpse for most of my life. At the age of five, I saw the films Ghost Story (1981) and Poltergeist (1982). Both are about the angry dead, and both feature gruesome moments when the putrid cadaver attacks the living. Although I suffered from nightmares about vengeful corpses for years after seeing those films, I have persistently continued to replenish my imagination’s stock of frightening narratives and images by watching horror films, particularly those about the living dead. These films depict the corpse as a reanimated, flesh-eating, contagion- spreading horror that reproduces itself by infecting living bodies. Always a question- asker, I wanted to know why. Why is the corpse frightening? When and why did it become so? How did the corpse come to be so closely tied to notions of contagion and horror? With these questions in mind, I determined to search for the origins of corpse horror by investigating how culture frames survivors’ understanding of death and dead bodies. The study of death as a cultural event is not a novel subject. Historians and anthropologists have tracked, examined, theorized, and debated the relationship between death and culture across time and among disparate societies. The Victorian obsession with death has been of particular interest to historians and cultural critics. Pursuing this inquiry, scholars produced studies about ritual, place, and survivors. Pat Jalland investigates middle-class notions of dying, death, and mourning in relation to the Evangelical good death framework in Death in the Victorian Family (1996), and James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death (2000) discusses Victorians’ elaborate 2 funerary practices, their strictly circumscribed and enforced mourning conventions, and the founding of garden cemeteries. Works that concentrate upon how religion framed Victorians’ conceptions of death, dying, and the afterlife include Michael Wheeler’s Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (1990), John Morley’s Death, Heaven and the Victorians (1971), and Geoffrey Rowell’s Hell and the Victorians: A Study of the Nineteenth-Century Theological Controversies Concerning Eternal Punishment and the Future Life (1974). A handful of studies emphasize the importance of class to survivors’ understanding of death. Such texts address burial and, to a certain extent, the dead body. Julie-Marie Strange’s Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870-1914 (2005) examines working-class attitudes towards death and burial, and Thomas Laqueur’s “Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals” (1983) traces the degradation of the pauper burial as part of the increasing tendency to punish the poor for their poverty. There are books on different ways of producing corpses: Francis Smith’s The People’s Health 1830-1910 (1979) maps out death by disease or medical mishap; Richard Altick’s Victorian Studies in Scarlet: Murder and Manners in the Age of Victoria (1970) details murders; and Victor Bailey’s “This Rash Act”: Suicide Across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (1998) traces modes and reasons for self-murder. There are books about depicting death, notably Garrett Stewart’s Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction (1984), which presents a linguistic analysis of death scenes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels. Much of the work on Victorian death turns away from the corpse. After all, death, not the dead body, is the most conspicuous term and theme among these scholarly studies. Indeed, apart from Ruth Richardson’s well-researched contextualization of 3 Britain’s 1832 Anatomy Act, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (1989), which centers upon the underclass corpse, and Elisabeth Bronfen’s psychoanalysis-framed discussion of nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of the female corpse, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic (1992), few works concentrate their analyses upon the dead body. In light of this absence, I set out to investigate the less-studied corpse not only to return to its cultural specificity but also to trace the emergence of horror-inflected depictions of dead bodies in fiction. Surely, I thought, the best place to begin looking is the genre defined by its chilling effects—the Gothic. Emily Saint Aubert, the heroine of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), lifts a veil to reveal a corpse whose “features, deformed by death, were ghastly and horrible,” and even, the narrator later tells us, “partly decayed and disfigured by worms” (114, 196). Horrible enough, and yet it is nothing more than a wax figure. Furthermore, even waxwork corpses are not standard fare in English Gothic literature. Stories present many ghostly traces, but there are fewer dead bodies. And when a corpse does emerge—improperly disposed of in a well or its dismembered parts hidden in secret nooks—the text does not often linger on its decomposing flesh. In the Gothic, the corpse is a spectacle of discovery but not often a spectacle in and of itself. Rather, spectacular corpses are to be found not in those texts designed to chill their readers but (not unlike the “real” corpses they suggest, those mouldering in the great urban centers) in nineteenth-century novels designed to investigate social problems engendered by class stratification—particularly industrial novels. The industrial novel does horrify the reader, but the horror grows as the novels expose the causes of death in environmental degeneration and collective misdeeds. So my 4 investigation similarly came to circle outward. I realized that the corpse’s tale of horror was written not only in novels but also in political, medical, and legal texts; more importantly, I found that there is more to the corpse than horror. So, what kind of spectacle is a corpse? A corpse can be a superlative beauty or an absolute horror. “‘How beautiful she is!’” Mr. Donne exclaims of Ruth’s three-day-old corpse in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) (376). There is no sign that her carefully arranged corpse is a dead body rather than a living one posed for a tableau vivant. She is an unchanging, waxen beauty: arms, face, cheeks, and hair as perfect as they were in life, not sunken, not stiff, not discolored. Her corpse illustrates the good death narrative in which a pure soul dies a good death and leaves behind a perfected version of the flawed living body. To gaze upon such a wonder is to feel that death is beautiful, not frightening. In contrast, John Boucher, a factory worker in Gaskell’s North and South (1854), drowns himself in a dye-filled puddle after being implicated in a riot. This an ugly corpse identified in terms of its “disfigurements”: “his face was swollen and discoloured; besides, his skin was stained by the water in the brook” (Gaskell, North and South 269). Even laid out, the corpse is hardly recognizable. Boucher’s own child asks, “‘Is yon thing upstairs really him? It doesna look like him’” (Gaskell, North and South 275). Perversely, both perfected and disfigured corpses are spectacles: in nineteenth-century novels there are beautiful bodies and ugly bodies, corpses that uplift and corpses that horrify, flesh that becomes more beautiful after death and flesh that immediately is overtaken by rigor mortis. My quest for the spectacular death had here become a very different project, a far more wide-ranging investigation of the myriad ways in which early- to mid-nineteenth- 5 century English culture understood the dead body. For survivors in the nineteenth century, the dead body had several potential postmortem lives. It could make death soothing or frightening, serve as a means to control social behavior, alleviate disease, and serve justice. The process of creating meaning for the dead body is a means of forcing the uncategorizable corpse and unknowable death to mean something; thus, nineteenth- century narratives endeavored to produce order from disorder, boundaries for that which lacks boundaries, and meaning for what lacks meaning. Out of the tangle of claims made in nineteenth-century media about the nature of the corpse, I extract four narratives: one centered within the industrial novel, a second in sanitarian reform, a third in body- snatching, and the last in the inquest. I argue that Victorians developed these narratives to define the dead body’s possible postmortem trajectories, meanings, and uses. Together, these narratives compose a social history—the life of the corpse in nineteenth-century culture—played out in the realms of the novel, law, medicine, and politics. Each narrative is a hybrid of discourses that both constructed and criticized the corpse narrative. While all these narratives offer us fascinating bodies, novels, forced to find narrative solutions but also perhaps more open to conflicting discourses, often offered alternative understandings and solutions to culturally tangled corpse-centered debates, understandings often available only in the realm of fiction. It is the dead body’s incomprehensibility that renders it a necessary subject of corpse-managing narrative frameworks. Death is inaccessible to experiential means of knowing; arguably, this is true even at the death moment, for who can say whether one knows death or merely dies? Therefore, death is by nature beyond understanding. The corpse is death’s equally alien but less-discussed product. A remnant of something that 6 no longer remains, the dead body is a paradox. Death obliterates the person; nature obliterates the body. Before obliteration, the corpse is a remnant that is familiar (it looks like the person who has died) and yet is something unfamiliar (though it resembles the person, the person is gone). “What we call mortal remains escapes common categories,” novelist and philosopher-critic Maurice Blanchot writes in his essay “Two Versions of the Imaginary” (1951), for the corpse “is neither the same as the person who was alive, nor is it another person, nor is it anything else” (256). The dead body resembles the person you once knew, but the animating force has vacated its fleshy house and thus leaves a husk. Familiar and unfamiliar, the corpse lacks “any relation with this world, where it still appears” (Blanchot 258). The dead body then is a contradiction, a present body that indicates an absence. This “cadaverous presence . . . establishes a relation between here and nowhere” and as such, points to the unknown that is behind perceptible reality (Blanchot 257). The dead body is something that points to nothing. It is fearful and awe-inspiring. Nineteenth-century thinkers acknowledged and wrestled with this same paradox that defines the corpse’s uncategorizable between-ness. Over 120 years before Blanchot’s mystical analysis of the corpse, nineteenth-century surgeon and reformer Southwood Smith articulates the paradox. In the 1832 edition of Use of the Dead to the Living (1828), he explains that “[i]t is with the corporeal frame that our senses have been familiar,” and so the survivor approaches the person’s corporeal remains with “deeper affection because they are all that remain to me” (29). At the same time, the body is merely a “senseless mass of matter” from which “the spirit which animated it and rendered it lovely to my sight and dear to my affections, [has] gone” (Smith, Use of the 7 Dead to the Living 29). The dead body is both (and yet also neither) the beloved friend and a mere mass. As Smith points out in his 1832 Lecture Delivered over the Remains of Jeremy Bentham that he gave over the corpse of his dear friend, the utilitarian political and social reformer whose body he soon would dissect, the corpse is an absent presence. His friend Bentham, he declares, “is not here! But here still are the features of my friend, and this is his form” (Smith, Lecture 69-70). Foreshadowing Blanchot’s description of the corpse as a fleshy reminder of the “shadow ever present behind the living form,” Smith writes that the dead body is “a wreck which was what we are, and is what we soon must be” (Blanchot 258; “Anatomy” 128). The thing that is and is not points to the nothingness we all are destined to become. The corpse’s meaning is unstable, and because it lacks stable meaning, survivors must create a framework that renders it comprehensible. The corpse’s confounding nature is not a discovery of either the nineteenth or twentieth century, nor even an invention of the West. Anthropologists, such as Mary Douglas, Victor Tuner, Maurice Bloch, Jonathan Parry, and S. C. Humphreys, and Helen King, have documented the ambiguous corpse in multiple cultures. In her seminal structuralist text, Purity and Danger (1966), Mary Douglas argues that culture creates systems of classification that define boundaries—identifying and separating order and disorder, purity and dirt, the familiar and unknown, self and not-self. After demarcating boundaries, culture then implements rituals of separation. Dirt “is essentially disorder,” that which is unclean and represents matter out of place (Douglas 2). Disorder both spoils the pattern of order and provides the material for order—the impure that defines the pure. If the purpose of “separating, purifying, demarcating, and punishing transgressions have 8 as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience,” then the dead body is perhaps the most inherently untidy thing (Douglas 4). As an ever-changing thing that is not what it appears, the corpse is a fundamental transgression of order and being. What disrupts the processes of separation by its ambiguity is liminal. Along this line, anthropologist Victor Turner writes, “we may regard our dead as filthy and polluting, for they make themselves known in the liminal space that is betwixt-and- between all ‘pure’ classifications and unambiguous concepts” (39). For one, the body’s relation to its former self (the social individual) and its present state (a corpse) is ambiguous. Second, natural postmortem putrefaction destroys physical integrity. Physical completeness, Douglas explains, preserves the individual from defilement because the “wholeness of the body [is] seen as a perfect container” (53). From the moment of death until the body becomes actual dirt, it is in the process of dissolution: insides seep outside, solids soften (autolysis), and pliable matter hardens (rigor mortis). During this metamorphosis in which it is becoming and un-becoming, the dead body loses its resemblance not only to the person it used to be but also to what is recognizable as human. This untidy corpse is liminal, and its ugly changeability seems to place it in the category of dirt. However, in culturally specific categorizations, the dead body is not always dirt. Nineteenth-century medical men and sanitarians considered the corpse dirt, but novelists sometimes depicted the corpse as an unchanging, purified, and purifying beauty. The dead body discomfits survivors because it is dirt, it is liminal, and it is uncanny—that which “arouses dread and horror” (Freud 930). “[P]erhaps the most striking of all, of something uncanny,” Freud writes in “The Uncanny” (1919), is the 9 dead body (945). The uncanny occurs when a thing or experience calls forth repressed infantile complexes or resurrects primitive beliefs. Corpse fear is arguably the most fully preserved vestige of primitive thinking in modernity, for “almost all of us still think as savages do on this topic [death and dead bodies]” (Freud 945). Such persistence continues because, even in an age of science, death is still unavoidable, incomprehensible, and elicits powerful unscientific and unmanageable emotion. The first not-quite-surmounted primitive thinking the corpse elicits is the omnipotence of thoughts—specifically, wish fulfillment and a belief that the dead can return through ghostly or actual reanimation. Here a survivor might exclaim to herself, “‘So, after all, it is true that one can kill a person by the mere wish!’ or ‘So the dead do live on and appear on the scene of their former activities!’” (Freud 949). Fear of the hostile and vengeful dead is the second resurrected primitive mode of thinking. In this case, Freud writes, “[m]ost likely our fear still implies the old belief that the dead man becomes the enemy of his survivor,” and tries to make a corpse of the surviving body, a fear that informs the Gothic subgenres involving vampires and zombies (945). This fear of the hostile dead, Freud points out in his earlier text Totem and Taboo (1913), is a product of projection. It is the living, not the dead, who harbor hostile feelings, an emotional ambivalence of which they are unconscious. Projection enables the living to deny those hostile feelings by displacing them onto the object of hostility, the dead. Therefore, the uncanny feeling associated with corpse fear is really survivors’ fear of their own emotional ambivalence and hostility. Still, as Freud himself concedes, in literature not everything repressed or incompletely surmounted is uncanny. Corpses and survivors’ reactions to them do not fall 10 predictably into an invariable pattern. Dead bodies are neither always dirt nor always uncanny. If the corpse’s threatening strangeness is an ancient if not ageless problem discernable in many if not most cultures, why is the problem’s permutations in early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain of particular interest? It was during the first half of the nineteenth century that the corpse became most profitable and most troublesome. During the 1820s, the black market in stolen corpses reached its peak in profitability and risk even as the public grew violently opposed to corpse-theft. Through the 1830s and 1840s, metropolitan burial grounds had become so disgustingly replete with corpses that they were a public nuisance; meanwhile, the funeral industry’s significant expansion of services drove up burial costs, leading to underclass families’ inability to bury their dead in a “respectable” and timely manner. Between the 1830s and 1850s, the corpse-to-be- investigated was fought over by coroners, magistrates, and medical men. Most importantly, there simply were more dead bodies around than previously because of population explosions and stubbornly high mortality rates. By 1830, it became apparent that corpses needed to be regulated. In the past, bursts of corpse regulation occurred during epidemics when officials would control how the survivors ought to dispose of disease-ridden dead bodies. During the nineteenth century, corpses often were the subject of public discourse and argument. Repeated and persistent endeavors to legislate corpse care and uses centered not just on disease-ridden bodies but also on purely redundant bodies, useful bodies, and mysterious bodies. During the age of industrialization, the government sought to manage the effects of redundant bodies through forms of social control and sanitary reform. As medical theory shifted towards an emphasis upon 11 anatomy, the rise of dissection-based medical education and research made the corpse eminently useful. Mysterious corpses, those whose cause of death was uncertain, were also useful objects, the investigation of which, coroners argued, could protect the public. In the latter two cases, the law developed frames for investigator behavior and outlined the appropriate uses for the dead body. England was the first country to industrialize and perforce the first to deal with the social byproducts of industrialization, such as an unprecedented rise in concentrated populations and the resulting spread of infectious diseases. Industrialization littered the actual and social landscape with bodies—worn out, debilitated, diseased, starved, dying, and dead. These unfortunate products of poverty and labor grew more numerous as the population grew. Nineteenth-century England is a place of firsts, and London, its great city, seems to have been a place of superlatives—the most populous and the most polluted. London, Roy Porter writes in London: A Social History (1995), “was a European marvel . . . one of the few [cities] whose expansion continued unchecked,” more than tripling its population in 200 years, from 200,000 in 1600 to 900,000 in 1800, then more than doubling again before the middle of the nineteenth century to 1,945,000 in 1841 (Porter 157; Picard 2). Naturally, more people created more corpses. Greater concentrations of people living together in a city that did not yet offer necessary sanitary structures, such as sewers and clean piped water, facilitated the spread of contagious diseases. As Dr. William Farr notes in his First Annual Report of the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages, in England (1839), “mortality . . . increases with the density” (79). Of course, large cities historically have been subject to periodic epidemics that sometimes carried away great swaths of the population. What 12 astounds during the nineteenth century is not so much particular epidemics, though they were horrific, but the variety of diseases that yearly besieged Londoners: cholera, typhus, typhoid, “Irish fever,” scarlet fever, influenza, pneumonia, smallpox, consumption, and any number of then-undifferentiated fevers and disorders. In London and the industrial cities in the north, such as Manchester and Liverpool, in the throes of population explosions and degenerating and debilitating living standards, the underclass suffered disproportionately. And no wonder, as Frederick Engels explains in his Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1845): If the population of great cities is too dense in general, it is they [the poor] in particular who are packed into the least space. As though the vitiated atmosphere of the streets were not enough, they are penned in dozens into single rooms . . . They are given damp dwellings . . . They are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible food. (97-98) As is clear from Engels and many other sources, including parliamentary investigations on working-class professions, such as the 1842 Report of the Commissioners on Mines and 1843 Report of the Commissioners on Trades and Manufactures, working conditions had a devastating effect on the health and life expectancy of the working classes. The laborers’ living conditions, Engels points out, are “explanation enough of the excessive mortality in these unhappy abodes of filthy misery” (39). On the basis of union clerks’ returns submitted to him, reformer and sanitarian Edwin Chadwick in his 1842 report, Sanitary Condition of the Working Class in England, offers a most dire report of “the average or the mean chances of life” for England’s various classes (Chadwick, Sanitary 154). In Manchester, the mean life expectancy for “[m]echanics, labourers, and their families” was 17, whereas in Rutlandshire, an agricultural town, the mean life expectancy of laborers and their families was 38 (Chadwick, Sanitary 157). These life expectancy 13 numbers are so low in part because, unlike today, the investigators did not produce life expectancy numbers by age groups but rather for the entire population. Consequently, high infant mortality rates—57 percent of deaths in Manchester and 62 percent of deaths in Liverpool occurred before the age of five—brought down the mean life expectancy (Chadwick, Sanitary 158, 160). In London’s Bethnal Green, where 1 in 1 4/7 deaths occurred among children under the age of five, laboring-class life expectancy was an abysmal 16 years (Chadwick, Sanitary 159). Most of the dead were children, but it is also true that more adults died in the squalid conditions of laboring-class districts in England’s great cities than died in the less densely populated districts populated by tradesmen and professionals. Thus the corpses piled up, and thus did the corpse become a class-bound issue. Not surprisingly, the dead bodies pile up in industrial novels of the 1840s. The first chapter’s subject is the industrial novel’s critique of the good death narrative. In fictional representations of the good death, the corpse is pure, beautiful, sanctified, and sanctifying. An investigation of the spectacle of dying, the death moment, and the corpse in the Victorian novel reveals the good death narrative, a conventional mode of portraying the death scene in which postmortem perfection displaces the death-marked corpse. This narrative mitigates the horror of death and the corpse by offering a comforting story of peaceful death, everlasting reward, and a lovely corpse, such as that epitomized by the death of Charles Dickens’s Nell Trent in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41). In contrast, industrial novels, such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), complicate the conventional tendency to simplify and allegorize death by confounding good death/bad death delimitations. These novels portray dead bodies that look like and 14 decay in the manner of actual corpses. In such depictions, the dead body is neither pure nor dirt; it is something always in between, both and neither. These death scenes argue that a painless, beautiful death is not fully accessible to those who live and die within the maw of industry and misery. The underclass dead body was tightly intertwined in the burgeoning endeavor to regulate society and the economy. In the 1840s, the unburied and badly buried dead body was a subject of alarmist public outcry and governmental inquiry. The bodies most investigated were not surprisingly those of the poor and working classes. Unable to afford burial for up to weeks after death, the underclasses kept their dead in their living quarters. Burial was performed in centuries’-old and for-profit burial grounds so replete with masses of putrid bodies that the graves’ contents often were disinterred, broken down, and half-reburied by gravediggers making room for more interments. Such a nuisance did the miasmic unburied or half-buried corpses of the underclass become that the House of Commons commissioned inquiries into the pre-burial and post-burial lives of corpses. In 1842, the Select Committee on Improvement of Health in Towns released Effect of Interment of Bodies in Towns followed in 1843 by Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Result of Special Inquiry into Practice of Interment in Towns. These two investigations produced corpse-centered legislation for decades. Sanitarians responsible for investigation and political clamoring were interested not only in discovering the origin of disease-causing miasmas in the cesspools of the underclass; they were also interested in legislating what was done with dead bodies, which led to policing the behaviors of the living, particularly the underclass. 15 The second chapter investigates the impure corpse in the medical-sanitarian narrative of the 1830s and 1840s. Focusing upon the corpse’s transformation from human to inhuman thing, this chapter offers a social history of the corpse out of which emerges a narrative of social control enacted on the bodies of the poor. Even as the undertaking business learned to profit from the dead body and the public’s growing fear of it, medical men and social reformers investigated and proclaimed the necessity of separating the corpse from its survivors. In spite of the growing middle-class consensus on the threat to morals and health the corpse posed to the living, the poorer classes preferred to establish a community of the living and the dead by maintaining close proximity with their deceased loved ones before burial. Novels also kept dead bodies close. Countering sanitarian and medical opinion on the classed corpse’s horror, Charles Dickens’s novels express greater concern about the solitary body and the middle-class body rather than the vilified corpses of the poor. During the 1840s, sanitarians sought to prevent the poor from keeping their dead, but earlier parliamentary legislation, the 1832 Anatomy Act, had guaranteed that surgeons could keep and study those same bodies. Justifying the corpse’s uses and ensuring access to the dead body was no easy matter. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the corpse often was a subject of legal battles, parliamentary reports, and legislation. Political and cultural factions struggled with corpse-centered questions: What was the dead body’s proper place in the law? Who had rights to use the body? In what manner? Law commentators and courts judged the dead body to be a thing that could neither be nor own property and deemed non-burial a punishable offence. From the late 1820s to the early 1830s, the dead body was at the heart of an emotionally charged 16 battle, fought in the newspapers, medical periodicals, hospitals, dissection-rooms, and Parliament (which produced the 1828 Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy), over which bodies could be dissected (the bodies of the poor, it turns out) and how they were to be disposed of afterwards. With the 1832 Anatomy Act establishing the first governmental inspectorate, the Inspector of Anatomy, which predated the 1838 factory inspectorate by five years, Parliament got into the corpse-regulation business. Situated within the context of the battle for control over the underclass dead body during the 1820s and 1830s, the third chapter investigates the trio of intertwined and mutually dependent narratives that sprung up around the body-to-be-dissected. The medical man’s career, reputation, and wealth were bound up with his access to and skill in using the dead body. At the same time, reputation and wealth were threatened by that access—legally, through his place as adjunct to the hangman and illegally, as a client in the much-despised corpse market. This paradox emerges in the medical man’s narrative about his profession, the body-snatchers, and the law. In turn, the medical man and resurrectionist presented their own narrative versions of the medical man’s dissecting activities. The medical man’s transformation into a knife-wielding medical detective depended upon an ever-increasing supply of dead bodies. Reacting to the dissector’s violation of interment and property law, the court narrated the corpse’s protections and helped write the medical man’s narrative by curtailing his access to the corpse even as civil law required more access. Out of the rising professional narrative of the brave medical researcher arose another professional narrative, that of resurrectionist who procured bodies for the dissector-client. Seeking to displace the threat to his reputation— public odium, criminality, and moral frailty—that came with the corpse trade, the 17 resentful dissector demonized his procurer. In this narrative, the body-snatcher became a profit-driven criminal, but Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) illuminates the resurrectionist’s ambiguity, for it is only by the help of body-snatcher Jerry Cruncher that Charles Darnay is saved. During the 1830s, at the same time as the medical men, the resurrectionist, and the law fought over the subject-to-be-dissected, the coroner’s office struggled for control over the dead body in judicial death investigations. Law- and medicine-trained coroners attacked one another during coroner’s elections and in newspapers over the right to interpret and speak the dead body’s tale, each declaring the other a bad corpse reader and a danger to the inquest’s status as a legal institution crucial to the upholding of justice and public order. Meanwhile, magistrates sought severely to curtail the coroner’s powers of investigation and punishment, an argument that resulted in yet another select committee report centered on the right way to manage a corpse: the 1840 Report from the Select Committee on the Office of Coroner for Middlesex. Coroners contested with one another, and magistrates contested with both, over the inquest’s function and who was best suited to investigate the corpse. If novels raised the dead, they also serve as rich narrative inquests. The Victorian inquest endeavored to produce a narrative of the body’s death, determine blame, and punish accordingly. A tool to reveal crime or a bungling court through whose doors murderers escaped, the inquest could uncover secrets death-silenced lips could no longer voice or could smother those tales. Proclaiming the inquest’s potential to serve the public, populist coroners spoke of an ideal of the inquest’s purpose and structure that allowed the inquiry to function as a means to expose abuses of authority to the public. In practice, the 18 inquest more often failed to hold authorities responsible for their wrongs, a failure inquest reports clearly reveal. Further questioning the inquest’s ideals, novels such as Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) and Gaskell’s North and South (1855) point to the inquest’s several failings while offering a solution: a novel’s narrative. A novel like Middlemarch (1871- 72) goes even further, when George Eliot proclaims her triumph over a failed investigative cultural form; only the novel, she agues, through testimony and circumstantial evidence gathered and presented by the narrator, can offer all the pertinent details necessary for the reader to piece together the tale of the dead body and in turn render a just verdict. Even a cursory reading of the corpse’s place in public discourse makes it obvious that a dead body was the subject of mass anxiety—the anxiety to investigate, to regulate, to enclose, to make disappear, and above all to create a proper story and defend against an improper one. The corpse must have a certain trajectory from death to burial and beyond, and each corpse narrative presents its own path. By properly managing the dead body, the narratives’ proponents argued, the living can make death less fearful or decrease its incidence. Seeking to uphold the maintenance of social order and the common weal, novelists, reformers, medical men, and agents of the law struggled over defining and enforcing the corpse’s proper pre- and post-burial trajectory. While each faction agreed that what the living did with the dead shaped how death and the corpse affected survivors, they did not agree with one another about the nature of that impact nor what should be done with the dead. Nonetheless, all narratives endeavored to exert some control over death by managing the corpse. Underclass corpses were the most investigated and legislated, declared the most dangerous and necessary, and the survivors 19 most subject to surveillance on the part of governmental agents determined to police their behaviors and attitudes. That which cannot be contained within boundaries threatens the integrity of classificatory systems that keep disorder at bay, so categorizing and regulating the corpse does not solve the problem, as I demonstrate in the following chapters. Because the corpse always will defy boundaries even as it defies its own fleshy borders, corpse narratives are not marked by their consistency. Dissection of such narratives reveals category blurring, tension, and doubt. However, even if the categorization that the narratives endeavor to implement ultimately does not solve the messy corpse problem, it is an attempt to manage that problem, to force the body to mean something, even if there is a plurality of meanings and even if the corpse always threatens to slip out of its categories. These chapters together present a story about the fractured narratives the nineteenth century produced in order to manage the corpse and that offered the dead body multiple potential postmortem lives. But that story is far from complete. Indeed, the corpse the Victorians invented remains material for public fascination and consumption, in ways that do and do not remind us of its nineteenth-century antecedents. During the past decade, corpse-centered narratives in entertainment media have been proliferating. The film industry is in the midst of the first horror film cycle of the twenty-first century. This cycle, most likely spurred by 28 Days Later (2002) (although not strictly a zombie film, it too centers on a spectacle of the human rendered inhuman by the contagion-engendered absence of reason and individuality), prominently features films about the living dead. Even George Romero, director of perhaps the most ground-breaking, though certainly not the first, zombie film, Night of the Living Dead 20 (1968), has made two zombie films in the past three years—Land of the Dead (2005) and Diary of the Dead (2008)—and a third yet-to-be-titled film is in production. What is more, Romero’s work in the past five years has spawned two remakes—Dawn of the Dead (2003) and a straight-to-DVD version of Day of the Dead (2008)—and at least one worthy horror-comedy semi-tribute, Shaun of the Dead (2004). Genre cycles fade and are resurrected and fade again; this is nothing new. What is new in the current cycle of corpse-narrative entertainment is the explosion of coroner- and forensic-centered shows. As media and communication scholar Joseph Turow confirms in his article, “‘The answers are always in the body’: Forensic Pathology in US Crime Programmes” (2004), “[t]he bumper crop of crime shows populated by medical detectives is unprecedented” (54). This cycle began with HBO’s gruesome ten-episode series Autopsy (1995-2005), led by celebrity-trial forensic witness Dr. Michael Baden. In 1996, basic cable took up the postmortem investigation narrative strand with The New Detectives (1996), and by 2000, network television created its own version—one that offered fictional stories and actors rather than dramatizations, interviews, and real autopsy footage with which the cable shows cobbled together their postmortem narratives—CSI (2000) and its handful of spin-offs, CSI: Miami (2004), CSI: New York (2005), and Bones (2005). These shows spurred a second basic cable investment in the genre with Dr. G, Medical Examiner (2004), and Dr. Michael Baden’s most recent venture, Dead Men Talking (2007). The dead body is not incidental to these shows’ narratives, for not only does the discovery of a corpse instigate each episode, the investigation is the central thread to the narrative. It is not surprising, therefore, that “[t]hese programmes have a fixation with the autopsy . . . as well as a painstaking thoroughness in dealing with bodily evidence” (Turow 55). In 21 addition, video games, which sometimes become mediocre horror films, demonstrate a definite obsession with gruesomely decomposing-yet-bloody reanimated corpses. Finally, the public has been entertained, even spellbound, by much-reported-upon spectacles centered on celebrity corpses (the fight for possession of Anna Nichole Smith’s corpse and the controversy over the two-week-long unburied state of James Brown’s body) and real-life investigations of celebrities’ dead bodies—the drawn-out and politically charged inquest on Lady Diana Spencer and the toxicology report-centered inquiries into the overdose deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Heath Ledger. The public is entertained by watching the production of a corpse and that corpse’s resurrection during the investigative process, or during a moment of horror as in the case of zombie-film reanimation. It can be argued that the recent outburst of zombie films, corpse investigation shows, and shoot-the-zombie video games are part of a visual entertainment genre cycle—a corpse cycle. Channeling Frederick Jameson’s discussion of film genre, R. Colin Tait’s recent article, “The HBO-ification of Genre” (2008) argues that “the systematic resurgence of genre films serves the grander purpose of informing popular audiences with the new circumstances of their era,” in part by “depicting their contemporary realities . . . or by infusing historical narratives with ideology which reflects their present eras.” Of course, there are no actual zombies running amuck in our backyards, but it is likely that certain twenty-first-century events have intensified anxiety about corpses and zombie-like behavior. Globally, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the following American invasion of Iraq, the number, frequency, and intensity of deadly terrorist attacks have intensified, which in turn produced fears and speculation about 22 supposedly brainwashed (or zombie-fied) terrorists and suicide bombers. In America, where many of the zombie-centered entertainment artifacts are produced, additional anxieties have been growing over a combination of ever-mounting civilian and military deaths, the visibility of Iraq dead, and the invisibility of American dead. First, the U.S. government persisted in continuing the ban, dating from 1991, on photographs of American soldiers’ caskets. (The pentagon partially lifted the ban in 2005 to allow for publication of some military photographs but not independent photographs.) Second, American news media have published far more photographs of Iraqi dead than American casualties; during a six-month span, September 2004 to February 2005, the Los Angeles Times found that of eight mainstream magazines and newspapers, only one published a photograph of an American casualty versus seventy-nine photographs of Iraqi dead (Rainey). Furthermore, news reports have exposed cases of unscrupulous medical- and postmortem-care professionals stealing and selling body parts. Both American and British patients have benefited from the pilfered bones and tissue. Stories have also emerged about mortuary and cemetery owners in America and England neglecting properly and promptly to dispose of the dead bodies in their care. Our graveyards are not overflowing, but the funeral director’s parlor is perhaps overpopulated. Resurrectionists no longer steal bodies, but funeral directors and medical men do steal body parts in order to make a profit. We no longer fear the contagion-producing corpses of the poor, but many do fear the corpse-producing ideological “contagion” of terrorists and suicide- bombers. The anxiety- and fascination-engendering fears that the dead body elicits in survivors shift emphasis, but, zombie-like, they never quite go away. 23 Chapter One The Most Awful Spectacle: Dead and Dying Bodies in Industrial Novels Mary Brotherton, the beautiful young heiress in Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy (1840), determines to investigate the living conditions of factory workers in her area. She enters a factory worker’s hovel in the slum of the factory town near her estate, where she finds a woman in the last stages of consumption. Gazing upon this dying woman, Mary’s “whole soul seemed settled in her eyes as she fixed them immovably upon what she felt to be the most awful spectacle that a mortal can gaze upon, namely, the passing of a human spirit from life to death” (Trollope 133). In nineteenth-century novels, the physical, social, and spiritual circumstances of death indeed afforded a “most awful spectacle” for characters and readers. A survey of how mid-nineteenth century novels depict dying, death, and the dead body reveals patterns underlying the relation between the manner of death and the state of the corpse as well as how characters react to the particular death and understand death in general. The “good” and “bad” death framework shapes these patterns, providing the formulae for styles of dying, witness expectations, and the status of the corpse. In the conventional modes of portraying the death scene, narratives often use the dualistic framework that simplifies death into an either/or configuration, the predetermined narratives of which serve as representational models. The good death narrative mitigates the horror of death and the corpse by offering a comforting story of peaceful death, everlasting reward, and an effaced or lovely corpse. In contrast, the bad death narrative offers a comfortless story of pain, fear, death as nullification, and an ugly 24 corpse. Conventional representation of death scenes and corpses—the majority of death scenes in Victorian novels—adhere to the frameworks’ formulae to some extent. Of course, not all death scenes and corpses abide by the either/or delimitations of the good death/bad death. Complicating the dualistic categorization principle, industrial novels occasionally refuse to depict death scenes in accordance with the either/or framework. Instead, they portray dead bodies that both look like corpses and decay like corpses. It is in these novels that overwork, starvation, and disease ravage the faces and limbs of men, women, and children, inscribing cadaverous death on their faces and bodies. Death is an enigma; representation of death is a paradox. According Mary Douglas and other cultural anthropologists who study death, cultures seek to counter death’s threatening void by developing a framework, usually bifurcated into the concepts of the good death and bad death. This framework enables social groups to feel that they possess some knowledge about the unknowable and control over the uncontrollable by providing them means to categorize and understand individual deaths according to a set of predetermined principles. The good death, cultural anthropologists Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry elaborate, “suggests some degree of mastery over the arbitrariness of the biological occurrence by replicating a . . . general pattern,” and this pattern obscures death’s unpredictability by providing a structure to death and offering a promise— renewal or everlasting life (15). The dying individual’s adherence to the pattern determines that individual’s future continuance. The good death often promises rebirth (or resurrection in the Christian mode) while “the ‘bad’ death represents the loss of regenerative potential” (such as obliteration or ever-lasting torment) (Bloch and Parry 16). In the good death, death comes not suddenly or unexpectedly: the person leaves his 25 body at the right place (a place of his choosing), at the right time (after fulfilling his duties), in a particular manner (with patience and fortitude), and leaves the remains intact. The dying person thus controls his way of death. Contrariwise, the bad death is being taken by death: the person dies in the wrong place (not in bed or a place of one’s choosing), in an unexpected or uncontrolled manner (by sudden or violent death), leaves a life unfinished, and often involves the body’s sundering. Death’s frightening unpredictability here resurfaces, “clearly [demonstrating] the absence of control” by rendering the person a passive victim of death’s randomness (Bloch and Parry 15). Finally, the good death/bad death conceptual framework functions in an allegorical mode: displacing death’s experiential and incomprehensible void by prescribing a predetermined narrative existing apart from individual bodies and individual deaths. The good death/bad death narrative is a prominent aspect of Christian eschatology that delineates a postmortem life of judgment, resurrection, and the afterlife. This narrative supplies the ideas and beliefs of what was for centuries the predominant conceptual framework of death in the West. Among the majority of England’s population through much of the nineteenth century, Christian eschatological discourse and its emphasis on the deathbed continued to dominate. Adhering to the good death’s general function—offering the illusion of some degree of control over death—the Christian version of the model good death prescribes, historian Ralph Houlbrooke writes, “patience in the face of trial, arduous but ultimately successful struggle with fleshly pains and spiritual temptations,” rewarded with “final quiet sleep in the lord” (27). In this model, affliction acts as a purifying agent that facilitates the dying person’s moral self-cleansing that is requisite for everlasting reward. However, learning the lessons of self-purification 26 and passing those lessons to witnesses requires a cooperative malady. A mortal accident or a disease that suddenly seizes and kills the body robs the individual of the time necessary to enact a struggle towards repentance and purity whereas a lengthy illness grants individuals the time to come to terms with their dying and conform to the behavioral precepts of the good death. The good death is a vital element in Victorian novels’ death scenes not only because it serves as the predominant narrative underlying individual death scenes but also because it greatly determines how witnesses react to and understand the death and the corpse. Furthermore, the manner of death (and the extent to which it conforms to or deviates from the good death narrative) determines how the text represents the dying body and the corpse. On the one hand, the bad death produces a gruesome corpse, altered or mutilated in death (and so appearing unlike the living person) or displaying the tormented appearance of the unregenerate (indicating that this death experience is decidedly unpleasant). On the other hand, the good death superimposes a reassuring story of continuity beyond death (the corpse still resembles the living person and does not decompose) and a promise of beatitude (embodied in the corpse’s smile), thus mitigating the horror of death’s void. The preeminent paragon of the good death and beautiful corpse in the English novel is the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-8) whose protracted period of dissolution and nature-defying postmortem state function as a paradigm that more than fulfills, indeed astounds, survivor expectations. Clarissa’s dying and her corpse are important because she is among the first, perhaps the most perfect, example of the good death in the novel. Also crucial is her vocalizing the stages of the good death in her letters 27 to others and orally to those at her bedside, who in turn circulate her words in their letters (all to an extent rarely if ever to occur again). Unjustly spurned by her family and raped by the profligate Lovelace, this nineteen-year-old model of purity is dying of “a broken heart,” a self-diagnosis her doctors confirm. Recognition, the first stage of the good death, initiates preparation for death and the hereafter. First the dying individual realizes she is indeed dying. Accompanying this realization is an alteration in the person’s stance towards life, often in the form of self- purification and distancing from the petty concerns of existence. Like many dying innocents to follow her, Clarissa senses her death working within her and informs her doctors that “I can judge by what I feel in myself, putting her hand to her heart, I cannot continue long” (Richardson 1276). Further identifying her imminent death and its cause, she attributes her shortness of breath “to inward decay, precipitated by her late harasses” from her family and Lovelace (Richardson 1276). Not only does she announce her death- status, she also continually updates those by her deathbed on that status and explains her reasoning by listing her lack of adherence to death signs, which she seems to know just as she knows she is dying. She explains, “I don’t think I am dying yet—not actually dying . . . for I have no bodily pain—no numbness; no signs of immediate death” (Richardson 1328). Part of recognition is acceptance and gratitude—acceptance, even impatience for her death (she “seemed disappointed when he [the doctor] told her she might yet live two or three days; and she said she longed for dismission!”) and gratitude that her dying is so very protracted (“It is not so hard to die . . . The preparation is the difficulty—I bless God, I have had time for that”) (Richardson 1341, 1361). During recognition, the dying 28 person neither denies nor seeks to escape death; there is no struggle against the inevitable, only calm (and calming) acceptance. Witnesses also must participate in recognition by acknowledging the mark of death on the face and body as well as in the changed demeanor of the dying. Understanding that death is near, witnesses may prepare themselves for the loss. Refusing to accept her declarations upon her impending death, those with whom Clarissa corresponds refuse to believe that she really is dying. Consequently, unprepared for the occurrence, they experience great shock and remorse. In addition, witnesses’ recognition is important to the successful enacting of the good death. Proximity to death purifies the speaker and therefore legitimizes the last speeches. People who believe a person is dying are therefore more willing to listen well to and carefully consider the last speeches. The dying person profits by demonstrating her goodness; the witnesses profit by observing a model of goodness and listening to the exhorting content of the speeches. During recognition, the second stage—taking to the deathbed—evolves. Once the dying individual acknowledges and accepts death, she can profitably contemplate her impending fate. (Part of Clarissa’s pre-mortem preparation entails the contemplation of abstract death and death’s most palpable symbols—her coffin and burial dress, which she has delivered to her chamber a full week before her death!) Clarissa describes the ideal mode of preparation, explaining that I dwell on, I indulge (and, strictly speaking, I enjoy) the thoughts of death . . . [I]t teaches me, by strengthening in me the force . . . to forgive the injuries I have received; and shuts out the remembrance of past evils from my soul. (Richardson 1306) 29 The dying person must exert herself to the fullest in order to learn from and be purified by the dying process (as Mrs. Norton writes, “you are brightened and purified . . . by your sufferings”) as well as endeavoring to purify others (Richardson 1328). Purification includes confession of one’s own wrongs, forgiving those of others, and exhorting the living to greater goodness. Clarissa, already a purified being, primarily exhorts and forgives. The dying heroine forgives Lovelace repeatedly on her deathbed and in her will, insisting, “I have no lurking resentment . . . tell the poor man that I not only forgive him, but have such earnest wishes for the good of his soul” (Richardson 1342). In addition to forgiving those who have wronged them, those dying the good death are responsible for teaching witnesses, through exhortation and model behavior, how to reform themselves and die well in their turn. She urges Belmont, “I wish you would permit me . . . to influence you in these my last hours to a life of regularity and repentance for any past evils you may have been guilty of” (Richardson 1337). Belford reports that Clarissa gives him and Colonel Morden a charming lecture . . . upon the happiness of a timely preparation and upon the hazards of late repentance, when the mind . . . was so much weakened, as well as the body, as to render a poor soul unable to contend with its own infirmities. (Richardson 1356) This “charming lecture” is a rather sharp-sighted one, for as later examples of deathbed scenes will show, sometimes the mind is indeed weakened, if not incapacitated, by the body’s struggle with illness, which troubles the dying person’s good death endeavor. The deathbed itself poses the greatest challenge to the good death and the possibility of a beautiful corpse, for it is here that the dying experience convulsions (which Clarissa suffers but once and which are conveyed secondhand to Belford), 30 delirium, dementia, insensibility, and a corporeal wasting that renders faces and bodies cadaverous. If the dying person has a cooperative malady, the last days and hours will be lucid ones in which patience and piety continue, regardless of pain. Hence, the good death is so often associated with a lingering death devoid of suffering so great that it incapacitates the dying individual. Clarissa’s mode of death is a reward for her goodness, permitting her to continue her pure behavior until her last breath. Although she warns Belford about the dangers of an illness-weakened mind and body, Clarissa herself never experiences pain even on her last day. The manner of her death is an occasion to thank God, for as she exclaims to Belford, “My body [is] hardly sensible of pain, my mind at ease, my intellects clear and perfect as ever. What a good and gracious God have I!” (Richardson 1345). It seems that God sends the cooperative malady to the good so that they may continue to be good. Those at her deathbed clearly discern her favored state. She “remains exceedingly weak and ill,” Belford writes, yet “Her intellects nevertheless continue clear and strong, and her piety and patience are without example” (Richardson 1341). Furthermore, Clarissa’s relatively easy death spares her body as well as her mind, for “though emaciated,” Clarissa’s “features are so regular and exact, her proportion so fine, and her manner so inimitably graceful, that were she only skin and bone, she must be a beauty” (Richardson 1351). The beautiful dying body is made such by demeanor and behavior as well as features and figure. Still, the idea that even as a “skin and bone” skeletal version of herself (never a beautiful state, to which anybody who has seen an anorexic body can attest) Clarissa would be “a beauty” seems to indicate a flesh- crawlingly irrational view of her body. Of course, equally chilling is Lovelace’s insistence that he should have her heart in order to preserve it. 31 It is the latter portion of this deathbed stage, which includes the last words and the death itself, about which most people who do not witnesses the death inquire. Belford writes to Lovelace, “You may be glad to know the particulars of her happy exit” (Richardson 1360). The “particulars” include the last words (what final words of wisdom do the purified dying leave to the living?), the last moments (does the dying person continue her good behavior?), and the state of the corpse (is it beautiful, smiling, and tranquil, or stiff and grim?). The final stage of the good death includes the metamorphosis from person to corpse, representation of the corpse’s pre-burial state, and the coffin’s displacing the corpse, after which oral and written histories become the site of postmortem continuance. Clarissa’s last words are words of blessing (“Bless—bless— bless—you all”), “And with these words, the last but half-pronounced, expired: such a smile, such a charming serenity over-spreading her sweet face at the instant as seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun” (Richardson 1362). The death moment announces the soul’s judgment in the appearance of the corpse’s face. Witnesses, seeing her smiling serenity, know that this soul has triumphed in the last test of dying. Mrs. Norton “admired the serenity of her aspect. She no doubt was happy” (Richardson 1370). Clarissa’s beautiful smiling corpse is an object of fascination for those who loved her, in vast contrast to Sinclair’s body, which even before her death is “huge quaggy carcase” (Richardson 1388). Belford applies to Clarissa’s corpse a sentiment often applied to a good death corpse, writing that We could not help taking a view of the lovely corpse, and admiring the charming serenity of her noble aspect. The women declared they never saw death so lovely before; and that she looked as if in an easy slumber. (Richardson 1367) 32 Death is like sleep, and the lovely corpse is undisturbed by lividity, rigor mortis, or bloating. Witnesses and survivors do not turn their eyes in horror from the beautiful corpse produced by strict adherence to the good death. Belford remarks that Mrs. Norton “was impatient to see the corpse” and opens the coffin “[w]ith trembling impatience” (Richardson 1370). One important aspect of the beautiful corpse is its changelessness. “Nor had death,” Mrs. Norton observes, “which changed all things, a power to alter her lovely features!” (Richardson 1370). Even when her corpse is four days old, Morden remarks, “The corpse was very little altered, notwithstanding the journey. The sweet smile remained” (Richardson 1400). After four days, even if the corpse is kept cool, which retards putrefaction, the body should have at some point stiffened with rigor mortis, and that smile would have become a grimace or at the least unsettling to behold on a stiff face. Certainly, lividity (or livor mortis) will have begun, causing discoloration ranging from the appearance of bruising to a blackened face. The good death protects the body from decay; consequently, days after the death, the corpse does not horrify the survivors. In many aspects of her death and corpse, Clarissa models a style of death followed by later deaths and corpses, except in one important aspect—language use. Colonel Morden and Belford persistently refer to Clarissa’s “corpse” in their letters (though when describing the body all use “her”). Later narratives rarely apply the word “corpse” to a beautiful corpse, instead reserving such language for the putrefying corpse or fresh corpse whose manner of death is intended to shock the reader. In this eighteen- century novel, “corpse” is not a term of horror but seems to function as a neutral term of reference. In her will, Clarissa depersonalizes her own remains (using “it” and “corpse” 33 and “wretched remains”) and claims them as her own (calling her corpse “me” and “I”) (Richardson 1413). Another use of “corpse” points to a second manner in which Clarissa’s example contrasts with later good deaths. In later texts, it is customary to displace the “corpse” with the “coffin” or “grave”; once the corpse is placed in the coffin, the narrative and characters refer to the coffin, not to the corpse. The opposite occurs in Clarissa’s place, wherein people more often refer to “the corpse” rather than the coffin. During Clarissa’s burial service in the church, Colonel Morden writes that “the corpse was on stands” and “the corpse was to be carried down” rather than referring to the coffin (Richardson 1407, 1408). (Obviously, they did not place Clarissa’s corpse on stands in the church!) The coffin conceals the putrefying corpse, allowing survivors to imagine the dead in a state less horrible to behold and smell. It could then be argued that because Clarissa’s body is lovelier than the coffin there is no need to displace her corpse. (The earlier conjecture that Clarissa’s body would be beautiful as skin and bones leads one to wonder whether it would not also be beautiful as mummified skin and bones.) The survivors are most interested in the still-lovely corpse, not the coffin or a perfected corpse the survivor might imagine lies in the coffin, an imagining possible only if a coffin conceals the actual putrefied corpse from view. The beautiful shell (the corpse) needs no beautiful shell (a coffin) to conceal it because its beauty is indissoluble. Thus, the body can displace the coffin in language and thinking, though the actual coffin displaces the actual body because the body is the superlative beauty. Clarissa’s renowned exemplar of dying well occurs in an eighteenth-century novel; nineteenth-century novels followed and modified the pattern. Death scenes illustrating the formula—pious dying speeches, uncomplaining deaths, peaceful, 34 sometimes smiling corpses—are not rarities in Victorian novels. Still, however numerous may be the corpses that are beautiful because they are at peace, the truly perfected and beautiful corpse is a rarity. Perhaps the most often discussed and extravagant representation of the model good death and beautiful corpse in the Victorian novel is that of little Nell Trent in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop. Nell adheres to the good death pattern set by Clarissa Harlowe—exhibiting recognition, acceptance, and (unnecessary) self-purification—in addition to manifesting elements of the good death that would become paradigmatic to the Victorian good death. Most important of these alterations is the death moment’s elision from the narrative. Showing neither pain nor fear, Nell “turned to the old man [her grandfather] with a lovely smile upon her face . . . and clung with both her arms about his neck. They did not know that she was dead, at first” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 736). As the witnesses’ initial ignorance of Nell’s transformation into a corpse indicates, there are no externally perceptible signs of the shift from living body to dead body. Neither implied nor displaced by a metaphor or euphemism—one of two conventional modes of (not) depicting the death moment in Victorian novels—Nell’s death moment demonstrates the second mode—erasure, which implies a painless shift between being and not being. A second element of the conventional Victorian good death that this death scene demonstrates is loving devotion, wherein the dying, when those close to death hold or are held by their loving witnesses. Nell’s corpse typifies a crucial aspect of the good death exemplified by Clarissa: the beautiful corpse smiling in its triumph over temptation in life as well as denying the ugly work of the inevitable processes of self-dissolution the body enacts upon itself. Like other conventional good death corpses to follow, Nell’s smiling corpse denies the real toll 35 dying extracts from the body, such as the emaciation and pinched features that often accompany wasting illnesses. The narrative circles around Nell’s body, exclaiming repeatedly upon its perfection in death, the reiteration of which itself functions as a sort of death knell. Here death claims the body and erases the little deaths of life that physiological and psychological suffering inscribe on the body, thus returning it to an unspoiled state. “Where were the traces of her early cares, her sufferings, and fatigues?” the narrative asks, then replies, “All gone” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 734). Perfected by death, “a creature fresh from the hand of God, and waiting for the breath of life,” the body is made new again, unspoiled by the world like the child-woman who left it (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 734). Little ravaged by long illness and seeming to be “not one who had lived and suffered death,” this body surpasses the common trope of equating death and sleep, for in her corpse is found “No sleep so beautiful and calm, so free from trace of pain, so fair to look upon” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 734). This is a body that exhibits no signs of death; even two days later, “still her former self lay there, unaltered in this change” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 734). The smiling, never-putrefying corpse is a soothing emblem of death that hints at continuity in its changelessness because it is a symbol of life unlived and unspoiled. This body displaces the unexceptional body, the corpse that must decay. Clarissa’s and Nell’s lives have been so pure that their deaths are painless and their corpses spared the last indignity of postmortem autolysis (self- digestion). In the model good death, then, the dying person’s unspoiled moral state in life transfers to the physical body after death, remaking the physical body so that it resembles the perfected moral state. 36 As Nell’s case clearly demonstrates, bodies produced by the good death do not become less-than-human masses of decomposing flesh. Clarissa’s body is a “corpse” to her survivors, but in Victorian novels, the smiling good death corpse is rarely a “corpse.” “Corpse,” “carcass,” and “cadaver” are all terms that emphatically point out that the body is indeed a dead one, a shell from which the social being has been vacated. In contrast, referring to a dead body by name or as a “she,” “her,” daughter, sister, or mother denies the gap that death creates by insisting on naming the body according to its position in the social fabric during life. (This can also function as a mourning strategy that permits the survivors to maintain a place for the dead in an ephemeral community of the living and the dead.) Dialogue and first-person narratives seldom refer to the corpse using the neutral pronoun “it” while omniscient narratives often refer to corpses as a “thing” and an “it.” When the corpse is a beautiful one, often even in omniscient narratives wherein the body usually is an “it,” that dead body retains its identity as a gendered person—a “he” and “him,” a “she” and “her.” Here Nell again serves as an exemplary model. Even on the third day after her death, Nell’s dead body is still a “her” and “she,” still “pure as the newly fallen snow that covered it [the grave]” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 740). Once laid upon the ground, “she” becomes a “burden,” the grave displaces the “burden,” and so the lovely corpse becomes “her grave” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 740). Thus, the grave displaces Nell’s body as the site to which survivors look to contemplate her story, after which they produce and circulate their own stories interpreting her life and death. These stories displace the grave, which itself displaces the perfect corpse, each displacement moving the mourners farther from the actual corpse. By maintaining the corpse’s humanness and social place as gendered beings, both a narrative’s word choice 37 and the survivors’ speeches and representations deny that the body has lost its personhood. As Clarissa’s and Nell’s death scenes demonstrate, the good death framework prescribes behavioral precepts that guide the actions of the dying, provides a conceptual framework that conditions survivors’ perceptions of and responses to the dying and the death, and influences their interpretation of the death and the corpse. As part of fulfilling the first stage of the good death (recognition and acceptance of imminent death), the dying are among the first to realize their impending fate and accept it calmly. This requires the dying to have the capacity to listen to, to feel, to be in touch with their bodies; they know that they are dying. They do not require a doctor to inform them that their malady is mortal; this fact they discern without the intervention of the medical profession. In Charlotte Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood (184l), the eponymous heroine tells her long-time friend Richard Green, “‘I feel sure, quite sure, positively sure, that my days are numbered, and that not many remain. . . . Death is at work in me’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 286). Like Clarissa before her, this good and pious girl can diagnose her own death, albeit with less specificity (Clarissa names her ailment and its cause). Richard reasons with her, “‘in the first place you are not a doctor; and it is quite impossible you should know so much about your health as you fancy,’” and Helen does admit that she consulted a doctor since “‘I thought it my duty to know the real state of the case’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 287). This concession implies that Richard is indeed right and that one’s body and health are beyond the analytical capacity of any but a medical professional, but after this apparent concession, Helen returns to her previous assertion of knowing, for the doctor “‘told me nothing more than I was sure of already,’” and so 38 merely “‘confirmed me in my opinion’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 287). Helen reasserts the ability of the dying to determine their state of health. They do not need doctors to diagnose their fate, though the living might require such a confirmation in order to overcome their own reluctance to accept that their loved one is dying. In her silent, internal exploration of her state of being, Nell Trent too feels “a dull conviction that she was very ill, perhaps dying” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 343). After recognition and acceptance come the initial stages of purification and withdrawal from every-day life and concerns. Soon after Nell’s recognition, Death—filled her with deep and thoughtful feelings, but with none of terror or alarm. A change had been gradually stealing over her . . . . With failing strength and heightening resolution, there had sprung up a purified and altered mind; there had grown in her bosom blessed thoughts and hopes, which are the portion of few but the weak and drooping. (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 393) First, she recognizes that she is dying even though her grandfather is nearly blind to her illness, and because she is still pure, unpolluted by moral failings and spiritual temptations, she does not fear what is to come. Nevertheless, even in this innocent unblossomed little child-woman, death can still improve upon her purity and the piety of her thoughts (those “blessed thoughts and hopes” that blossom in her bosom). Those dying the good death are blessed with an altered state of mind that prepares them for the hereafter by instigating self-purification and pious thoughts. The increased purity of thought and behavior implies heaven’s grace, given to those who endeavor to deserve it by following the pattern. The good death further blesses its adherents with intimations of heaven in visions, both visual and auditory. Nell Trent witnesses the death of a little scholar, whose “eyes were very bright; but their light was of Heaven, not earth” 39 (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 198). Nell herself, later slowly sinking into death, repeatedly dreams of the little scholar and “of the roof opening, and a column of bright faces, rising away far into the sky . . . [and] there was music in the air and a sound of angels’ wings” while on her deathbed she hears “beautiful music which she said was in the air” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 396, 736). A young boy at the “baby farm” where Dickens’s Oliver Twist spends his days before going to the workhouse tells him “‘I heard the doctor tell them I was dying’” and continues with “a faint smile,” “‘I know that the doctor must be right, O, because I dream so much of Heaven, and Angels; and kind faces that I never see when I am awake’” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 54). Smike, near death, confides to Nicholas Nickleby, “‘I have had such pleasant dreams’” of a place, he says, where he shall soon be, and “spoke of beautiful gardens, which . . . were filled with figures of men, women, and many children, all with light upon their faces; then, whispered that it was Eden” (Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby 719). For the dying, recognizing the impending transformation of the living body into corpse involves a combination of heavenly visions and mystical perception of the body’s imminent demise. The dying feel their death working within them before illness is legible on their faces and bodies; witnesses must see death working on the face and body of the dying, particularly if they do not accept the dying person’s statement of impending dissolution. Again, a cooperative malady is crucial since long illnesses inevitably alter the face and body, even, at times, in the model good death. The obliging illness cannot be a sudden mortal illness, such as a mortal stroke or heart attack, but rather one that gradually drains the body of vitality so that witnesses may read and measure death’s proximity in the body’s alterations. However, conventional good death narratives refer only briefly to 40 languidness or wasting; it is primarily in the industrial novel that the corpse that is yet to be is perceptible in the living face. Death here is readable in the living body, inscribed on the face, on the cheek, in the eye or voice of the dying. In Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, when fever strikes the factory, in which conditions are so bad that pious children are glad when others die because the dead feel neither cold nor hunger, “the ghastly countenances of each doomed victim stuck dismay into the hearts of their companions even before they were permitted to leave their labour, and sink down to that rest that should be disturbed no more” (Trollope 214). Later in the same novel, Mary Brotherton sees “a boy of ten or eleven years old, whose ghastly countenance showed plainly that death was busy at his heart” (Trollope 276). In a scene from Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s The Wrongs of Woman (1844) an infant, very soon before his death, is “the breathing corpse of a babe, . . . haggard, ghostly, and dwindling away” (Tonna, Wrongs of Woman 248). In these narratives, the dying are corpselike before they are corpses. The future cadaver signs the living body. The visibly death-tainted but still-living body signals to the witnesses that death soon will swallow the loved one. Witnesses must properly read and interpret the death signs upon the dying body; recognizing death, they may begin to prepare themselves to accept the loss. Refusal to recognize death makes the occurrence seem sudden, and consequently renders the death greater shock. When Mrs. Hale in Gaskell’s North and South (1855) begins to slide towards death, only her daughter Mary and their servant perceive and recognize the change, initially manifested in Mrs. Hale’s more frequent and earnest praying, greater patience, and gentleness. Despite Mrs. Hale’s altered appearance and behavioral changes, which in the good death framework signal the dying person’s 41 preparation for the hereafter, Mr. Hale denies her illness, exclaiming to Mary “‘you are growing fanciful! . . . She looks quite pale and white when she is ill; and now she has a bright healthy colour in her cheeks’” (Gaskell, North and South 96). When Mary gently counters, “‘But papa . . . I think that is the flush of pain,’” Hale declaims, “‘Nonsense . . . . You are the person not well, I think’” (Gaskell, North and South 96). Hale denies impending death, seeming willfully to misinterpret the flush on his wife’s cheeks. It is not until death is clearly inscribed on Mrs. Hale’s face that Mr. Hale at last realizes, most painfully, that his beloved is dying. Mary sees her mother lying there “with an unmistakable look on her face. . . . Death had signed her for his own, and it was clear that ere long he would return to take possession” (Gaskell, North and South 154). The sight of this death signature makes Mr. Hale ill: “Mr. Hale looked at her for some time without a word. Then he began to shake all over; and, turning . . . he groped to find the door” (Gaskell, North and South 154). Mary’s older brother Frederick, like his father, denies his mother’s impending death. The same day she dies, Frederick exclaims, “‘I don’t believe it. . . She is very ill, she may be dangerously ill, and in immediate danger, too; but I can’t imagine that she could be as she is, if she were on the point of death’” (Gaskell, North and South 228). The same day Frederick thus declares his doubt, his mother dies. Frederick’s and Mr. Hale’s refusal to recognize the seriousness of Mrs. Hale’s illness renders the death quite unexpected. Unprepared for the event, father and son are stricken dumb with grief and have difficulty processing the death. In fact, shock reduces Hale to incoherence and helplessness, for after the death he “sat by the bed quite quietly; only, from time to time, he uncovered the face, and stroked it gently, making a kind of soft inarticulate noise, like that of some mother-animal caressing her young” (Gaskell, North 42 and South 230). Refusal to recognize the signs of death indicates a willful blindness, and this refusal results in the survivors’ greater grief. Furthermore, denying the presence of death perforce impedes the witnesses’ participation in the good death process, for the witnesses’ responsibilities include interpreting and learning from the dying person’s behavior, speeches, and corpse. By recognizing and accepting the coming loss, witnesses are prepared to read the death scene in terms of a predetermined narrative—the good death—from which they are expected to benefit spiritually. The extent to which the dying individual’s deathbed behavior and her corpse conform to the pattern is a significant factor in determining how survivors perceive and understand that corpse, how they treat the dead body, and how they represent that body to themselves and one another. The last two phases of the good death—including the deathbed, the death, and subsequent corpse-viewing—offer lessons to the witnesses who are responsible for accepting and properly interpreting what they see and hear in relation to the good death precepts. The second phase of the good death, the deathbed, is a test of the dying person’s piety and acceptance of death, which she must demonstrate in her behavior during the most trying time of illness and in her last speeches to the witnesses (including confessions and speeches aimed at bettering the witnesses). The dying individual’s goodness and piety coupled with her proximity to death ensures the legitimacy of her last speeches, often consisting of exhortations towards pious behavior aimed at witnesses. Helen Fleetwood’s long-suffering cousin Sarah, dying throughout the novel, makes a lengthy moral speech praising Helen, who lifted her out of spiritual ignorance towards God, and exhorting her degenerate siblings to attend their long-neglected duty to be good Christians. At the end of this scene, the attending doctor 43 aptly summarizes the effect upon witnesses of deathbed scenes following the good death pattern, “‘This was a striking scene . . . it teaches us a lesson of submission to many things that we consider hard’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 319). Survivors, including those who did not witness the death, value these lessons in living better and dying well. As Mrs. Wilson in Gaskell’s Mary Barton comments, “‘it’s no use thy going to a death-bed if thou cannot carry away any of the sayings’” (358). For survivors, the sayings are an important element of the good death. The speaker’s proximity to death and preceding contemplation and self-purification grant that person a better understanding of duty towards man and God, which she can convey to listeners in her last utterances. Furthermore, the words are all the more precious because they are the last; it is in part the speaker’s proximity to death that grants the speeches their particular poignancy and power to move. Witnesses who do not recognize death reflected on the body of the speaker are more likely to fail fully to understand and appreciate the last speeches. For some witnesses, a particular individual’s enactment of the good death demonstrates how to die well and offers an opportunity to learn their duty to God and their fellow man. For others, the good death makes them aware of and grateful for life’s blessings. After witnessing the little scholar’s death, Nell Trent realizes that the sad scene . . . was not without its lesson of content and gratitude; of content with . . . her health and freedom; and gratitude she was spared to the one relative and friend she loved, and to live and move in a beautiful world, when so many young creatures . . . were stricken down. (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 200) The third phase of the good death, the death itself and survivors’ treatment of the corpse (viewing, touching, and laying it out), includes this latter lesson of gratitude and continues the principal lesson on how to die well. The good death and the corpse it 44 produces offer the witnesses a glimpse of immortality in heaven and the joyous afterlife, reunion with loved ones, and eventual resurrection. The widow Green notes of her son James’s death that “‘His departure was as if the gate of heaven had been for a moment set open before me, that I might catch a glimpse of the glories within’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 306). Writing to James’s older brother Richard, Helen Fleetwood adds, “‘if you were here, looking at the sweet smile upon his pale cold face, you would say death is more beautiful than life’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 306). The corpse is not beautiful here, but the appearance of peace and contentedness that dying the good death affords the corpse renders death beautiful and the corpse soothing. Gaskell’s Ruth, dead from contagious fever, has a “beautiful, calm, still face, on which the last rapturous smile still lingered, giving an ineffable look of bright serenity” (Gaskell, Ruth 377). The smiling corpse signals to witnesses that this person has successfully prepared herself for the hereafter, resulting in her acceptance into heaven. Self-purification and postmortem smiles indicate a good death, but the culmination of a successful good death requires witness participation. The witnesses view and interpret the corpse’s physical appearance as a sign and confirmation of Judgment, thereby substantiating the entire dying process by verifying that the end product matches the process. For those who learn the lesson of dying well, the smiling corpse signifies a promise—that dying the good death does in fact send the deceased to heaven. On occasion, witnesses are troubled by the idea of viewing the corpse and accepting the death, but if the death truly is a good one, the peaceful appearance of the beautified corpse calms the viewer. After having been informed that Bessy Higgins has (finally) died of “the fluff,” Margaret Hale utters “‘Poor Bessy! I never thought I should 45 not see her again’” (Gaskell, North and South 199). This comment indicates that “her” refers to living Bessy, and seeing the corpse would not be the same as seeing “her.” When told that Bessy’s sister asks “‘if you would like to see her [Bessy’s corpse]’” Margaret exclaims, “‘But she’s dead! . . . I never saw a dead person. No! I would rather not’” (Gaskell, North and South 199). Seeing “her” does not mean seeing a corpse, for once dead, Bessy is no longer Bessy but “a dead person,” and Margaret finds no value in gazing upon the dead body of her long-suffering friend. Margaret does agree to speak to Bessy’s sister, Mary, who relates Bessy’s last words, even though she does not describe the death itself. According to Mary, “‘Her last words were “Give her my affectionate respects; and keep father fro’ drink,’” words of gratitude and exhortation (Gaskell, North and South 200). These words expressing gratitude for Margaret’s friendship force her to reconsider her refusal, even though she “shrank a little from answering” Mary Higgins’s plea to see Bessy’s corpse. Finally, she acquiesces, still haunted by “fear of her own cowardice” (Gaskell, North and South 200). Unlike Mrs. Wilson in Mary Barton, Margaret does not actively seek details about the death, and she eschews seeing the corpse. Death intrudes little in Margaret’s life until she moves to the manufacturing town where, like the reader, she discovers that disease and death accompany industrial workers in their work and in their homes. In such towns, there is no escaping the sight of the dying and the dead. However, seeing the dead is salutary, not horrifying. Bessy’s dying is particular to her—in her last months, she speaks obsessively about her coming death and the afterlife to such an extent that Margaret feels discomfited by the morbid quality of her religious fanaticism. Bessy’s corpse, on the other hand, lacks particularity. In the following chapter relating Margaret’s visit to Bessy’s wake, the 46 narrative’s references to Bessy efface her corpse’s individuality so that Mary’s first interaction with a corpse is an emblematic one. She does not go to see Bessy Higgins (a “her” and a “she”) but to see “the dead.” Once in “the quiet presence of the dead . . . Margaret was glad that she had come. The face, often so weary with pain, so restless with troublous thoughts, had now the faint soft smile of eternal rest upon it” (Gaskell, North and South 201). Death erases life’s stamp from “[t]he face,” now no longer Bessy’s face since Bessy the person no longer exists. In compliance with the good death formula, the face displays a “faint” and “soft” smile while lacking any sign of the ravages of decomposition. Margaret’s visit comes a day and a half after Bessy’s death (since she died the morning of the previous day, and Margaret’s visit is during the afternoon), yet “the dead” shows no sign of livor mortis, no discoloration or bloating, which would horrify Margaret Hale during her first time viewing a corpse. Gazing upon this smiling corpse, Margaret felt that “a deep calm entered into her soul” (Gaskell, North and South 201). This incident adheres to the good death paradigm wherein even someone who is reluctant to see the dead can gaze and think, as Margaret does, “And that was death! It looked more peaceful than life” (Gaskell, North and South 201). The good death helps the living accept their loss and urges them to pious contemplation, for “the dead” here impels Margaret to think of “All the beautiful scriptures . . . ‘They rest from their labours.’ ‘The weary are at rest.’ ‘He giveth His beloved sleep’” (Gaskell, North and South 201). The corpse performs a service for the living; indirectly, death also performs a service to both the living and the dead, bringing both closer to God and to acceptance of humankind’s inevitable fate. 47 Not all survivors immediately accept the death, instead manifesting what psychologists identify as the first stage of grief—denial. In the good death mode, denial functions not as an expected stage in grieving since those who recognize and accept the good death also find comfort in witnessing its stages and completion. In contrast, denial indicates an unhealthy refusal to acknowledge the good death’s completion and a refusal to fulfill survivor responsibilities—reading the corpse and circulating the story and sayings of the good death. Higgins, having just heard of his daughter’s death stands studying the reality of her death; bringing himself to understand that her place should know her no more. For she had been sickly, dying so long, that he had persuaded himself she would not die; that she would ‘pull through.’ (Gaskell, North and South 201) He even asks Margaret, “‘Yo’re certain she’s dead—not in a dwam, a faint?’” and even though Margaret replies “‘She is dead,’” Higgins can neither fully process the discovery of nor accept the death (Gaskell, North and South 202). Margaret believes that viewing the corpse will break his denial and refusal to accept the death, so she implores, “‘Come with me . . . Come and see her!’” (Gaskell, North and South 203). In the corpse’s presence, Margaret relates Bessy’s last words to Higgins, “‘Her last words to Mary were, “keep my father fro’ drink”’” (Gaskell, North and South 203). By thus speaking Bessy’s last words, in the presence of her corpse, to her father who was not there to witness the death, Margaret acts as a sort of proxy for the now-dead woman and thus performs the deathbed scene. Speaking the dead girl’s words does not have the effect on Higgins that exhortation is supposed to produce—repentance and asseverations to do better in the future. Instead, having declared that at least, now dead, his daughter will no longer starve, quarrel, or grieve, he refuses to follow her last exhortation. Shortly thereafter, the 48 narrative reveals the origin of Higgins’s refusal to let this corpse’s beauty soothe him or permit her last words to urge him to better behavior: “‘I dunnot believe she’ll ever live again . . . I dunnot believe in any other life than this, in which she dreed such trouble, and had such never-ending care’” (Gaskell, North and South 209). He can neither read nor find comfort in his daughter’s good death because he does not believe in the good death, or rather what the good death is intended to promise to both dying and survivors— everlasting peace and eventual resurrection. Higgins’s refusal to comply with behavior expected from survivors reveals his disbelief in the good death’s function, ensuring that the good are judged as befits their life and death; without belief in this promise of beatitude and resurrection, Bessy’s dying demonstrates only the grind of pain and sickness brought on by factory work. In addition to those who refuse to acknowledge meaning in the good death and the corpse, there are those who hide their eyes from the sight of the corpse out of horror. Survivors can be reluctant witnesses who find no soothing qualities in death, being rather discomforted than otherwise, for not all sink gently into death with a smile. Some corpses, many of them found in the industrial novels, afford the witness not a glimpse of heaven but a gaze at the horror of death and the strangeness of the corpse, as Mary Brotherton discovers when she comes upon a man holding his dying boy, a “young victim of unnatural labour” (Trollope 276). The “spectacle” of an angry-looking man cradling a boy, on whose “ghastly countenance” Mary instantly reads death, “seemed to petrify every nerve, and the bounding elastic movement which had brought her within sight of it, was changed to the rigid stillness of marble” (Trollope 276). The sight of death coming to this poor boy “‘worked down’” in the factory is so horrible that Mary becomes 49 almost corpselike in a living rigor mortis, a “rigid stillness.” This is a death scene bereft of the comforts of the deathbed; the only comfort in this death is that the boy’s father cradles him when he dies. Here death lacks signs of peace or relief as the boy’s eyes closed, a shivering movement passed through all his frame and then he became still. The quick, short, unequal heaving of the breast was seen no more, and Mary hid her eyes as the mysterious change, which no human being can gaze upon unmoved, came upon the stiffening features. (Trollope 277) This stillness is not one to be mistaken for profound and tranquil slumber. The “mysterious change” at the death moment is not the transformation of the dying person’s face as good death erases the mark of life’s suffering, replacing it with a look of peace and joy, a vision that to the witness is like catching a glimpse of heaven. No indeed, this “mysterious change” is the body’s alterations after death that signal the onset of dissolution, in this case a rigor mortis so rapid that it begins within minutes of death and which signals the death rather than serving to measure how much time has passed since the vital spark went out. It is not surprising that Mary should hide her face from this scene, which is designed to discomfort the reader by exposing the sort of death to which mostly unregulated factory work subjected its workers. Moreover, this death is horrible because it implies the denial of access to the good death working people must face, for here even a child who cannot have been spoiled or made bad by the world must die without signs of grace. So far, survivors experience little difficulty in identifying the body as a corpse. In the good death, the body dies into smiling tranquility; in the more painful factory death, premature onset of postmortem dissolution clearly signals the body’s death. It would seem that correctly identifying the body as a corpse is not problematic, but such is not the 50 case. The principal factor leading to misinterpretation of the body’s status is the resemblance of unconsciousness and sleep to death, which can make the living body appear to be dead or the corpse appear to be sleeping. Michael Wheeler, scholar of Victorian culture and critic of Victorian literature, writes, “The most basic problem of interpretation in Victorian death scenes is diagnostic: is the dying person alive or dead?” (34). Certainly, Thomas Hood’s poem “The Death-Bed” gracefully states the problem: “We thought her dying when she slept, / And sleeping when she died” (11-12). Death, according to Christian eschatology, is a form of sleep before the trumpet sounds on the Last Day, calling the dead to life. Not surprisingly, so often in Victorian novels representations of the good death’s deathbed scene exhibit a slippage between sleep and death wherein death looks like sleep and sleep leads to death. Nicholas Nickleby, attending to his cousin Smike as he wastes away, “every now and then . . . bent down his ear to listen for the breathing of him who lay asleep, as if to assure himself that life was still there” (Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby 718). However, this understanding of death as a form of sleep can lead to misrecognition of the unconscious living body for a corpse, particularly when that body is close to death. The daughter of the dying woman in Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, On perceiving the deathlike countenance of her mother, made distinctly visible by the noonday light, that streamed through the open door, . . . suddenly stopped, clasped her hands together, and uttering in tones that sounded like a shriek—‘Oh! God, she is dead!’ (Trollope 133) The daylight does not help this girl read the corpse. Rather, it confuses visual reading because the light exposes the mother’s living corpseliness. Again here, sleep and death are visually indistinguishable, conveyed when Mary Brotherton corrects the girl, “‘Not 51 dead!—she is sleeping’” (Trollope 133). Similarly, in North and South Mr. Thornton’s sister Fanny mistakes Margaret Hale’s unconscious pallid form as a corpse and exclaims, evidently frightened, “‘Oh, I wish mamma would come! . . . I never was in the room with a dead person before’” (Gaskell, North and South 167). Again, a more sensible and discerning person points out that the body is still living—“‘She’s not dead: her eye-lids are quivering,’” the servant Jane remarks (Gaskell, North and South 167). In the first example, the dying woman’s daughter misinterprets sleep and the appearance of impending death for death itself. This sort of error is unsurprising and might even be an expected one, considering the ghastly appearance of this dying body in addition to the long-established custom of interweaving sleep and death. In the second example, Fanny sees death even though Margaret manifests clear signs of vitality (her quivering eyelids). This misinterpretation, then, is a product of careless perception and fear of the dead. Those unused to death cannot differentiate between actual death and deathlike states while those familiar with death fear the corpse. Fanny is anxious about the idea of being in the same room with a “dead person,” just as Margaret earlier demonstrates unwillingness to visit a “dead person.” Even Mary Barton, who had seen death, was affected by “the terror so natural to the young, not of death, but of the remains of the dead” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 268). The terror, perhaps, is “natural” because the healthy young person finds death a stark contrast to her own experience of vitality, which undermines her belief in the immortality of youth. It could then be argued that to avoid facing the corpse is to avoid acknowledging death in general and mortality in particular. The appearance of corpseliness can indicate deep slumber, rendering the eye an insufficient means to read the body. Stillness may yet be sleep and so cannot serve as a 52 sure sign of death. When a visual reading and identification of the body as corpse fails, the survivor is obliged to have recourse to another sense, such as that of touch, to measure vitality. The witness can measure the body’s vital status by verifying the presence or absence of algor mortis (the body’s postmortem cooling). In Tonna’s The Wrongs of Women, Kate Clarke cares for her lace-maker mistress’s baby who is dying from malnourishment, having been fed the infamous Godfrey’s (a mixture of treacle, water, and opium fed to infants among working class families in order to quiet them). The infant dies in Kate’s arms, and she, “half suspecting the truth, yet willing to hope that he sleeps more carefully shades the still face” (Tonna, Wrongs of Woman 256). Kate does not err in her perception of the body but rather deceives herself by denying what she knows. Kate’s response to the lace-maker’s inquiries, that the infant is “‘still as—as anything,’” is insufficient. The mother requests another level of testing: “‘Is he warm?’” No, for Kate finds that the infant has a “clammy brow” (Tonna, Wrongs of Woman 257). Denial fails under repeated testing that exposes the onset of decomposition—algor mortis. Algor mortis is perceptible only after the body has been dead for several hours because the corpse loses per hour approximately 2.5° the first three to four hours and 2° the next twelve hours. In order for algor mortis to function as a death sign, the narrative must hasten the process so that the flesh becomes chilled very soon after if not at the death moment, hours before such cooling of the body should be perceptible by touch. Occasionally, a corpse does adhere to natural law. Virginia, the doomed virtuous heroine of George William MacArthur Reynolds’s The Seamstress (1851) tells her seamstress- prostitute neighbor Julia Barnet that some time previously, she found her mother inexplicably dead one morning. Upon breaking down her mother’s door, the carpenter 53 rushed to fetch a surgeon, but Virginia determines herself that it is too late, for, she sobs, “‘My mother had already been dead many hours: the vital heat had already abandoned her form, leaving it as cold as marble—and as marble pale!’” (Reynolds, Seamstress 38). Virginia knows that the cold of her mother’s body means not only that she touches a corpse but also that her mother has been dead for hours, in contrast to the minutes or half- hour that pass before other novels’ corpses manifest algor mortis. Notably, algor mortis is the one sign of decomposition permissible in the good death corpse, for it merely drains the flesh of color without disagreeably altering the shape or elasticity of that flesh. Cold flesh is still perfect flesh, and indeed the whiteness of cold flesh contributes to the corpse’s perfected appearance. Rigor mortis—fixity or stiffness—is another sign of decomposition, and as with algor mortis, novels sometimes use rigor mortis as a death sign. The onset of rigor mortis begins between a half-hour to an hour after death. Each stage lasts about twelve hours— from onset to maximum fixity, maintaining intensity, and lastly, fading away. The entire process takes approximately thirty-six hours, depending upon environmental factors (heat speeds decomposition while cold delays it). However, in fictional representations of death and the fresh corpse, limited rigor mortis can manifest itself before the death moment, serving as an unambiguous sign of the body’s death directly after the death moment. Nan Leigh turns “stiff and weary” directly after the accident that kills her, and Mrs. Barton’s “cold unyielding flesh” signals to Mary Barton that her mother is dead. The same stiffness sometimes signals the body’s transition from a living body to a dead one: Mary Brotherton turns away from the “stiffening features” of the factory boy whose death transpires before her; Ben Davenport’s hand becomes “stiff, and heavy” at his 54 death moment; the queer client of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1836-37) realizes his wife’s death when her arm around his neck becomes “heavy stiff weight.” Postmortem fixity can horrify readers by serving a visual representation of death’s change, particularly when the witnesses note not merely stiffness but the stiffening of a body, and as such does not occur in instances of the good death. Equally disturbing is a near-preternatural stiffness after death. Arrested for murder, Jonas Chuzzlewit refuses to accept publicity, trial, and punishment, instead opting to place himself where “jury, judge, and hangman could have done no more, and could do nothing” by committing suicide on the sly using poison. Realizing what has happened after smelling the sweet poison, the arresting officers try to wrest the poison bottle from Jonas’s hand, but “[t]he hand had shut upon it tight. With that rigidity of grasp with which no living man, in the full strength and energy of life, can clutch a prize he has won” (Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit 777). Onset of rigor mortis can occur within a half-hour of death, but onset would not so soon produce a clutch stronger than the conscious grasp of the living. Premature fixity in death, the site of a body stiffening even as it breaths its last, or even a body stiffening in its natural time are all shudderingly horrible for survivors to witness. Good death corpses are cold and languid, not stiff and staring. Nell’s “fixed and changeless” smile is the closest the good death corpse comes to rigor mortis; besides, this smile’s fixity can refer to stillness rather than stiffness. Rigor mortis changes the elasticity and texture and flesh and muscle, altering the appearance of the dead limbs and dead face. The body, then, no longer completely resembles the dead person but becomes something like and unlike, a bad copy. If the good death promises continuity through an 55 unchanged or perfected corpse, then certainly the corpse cannot manifest rigor mortis and still exemplify the good death. Algor mortis or rigor mortis betray the body’s depleted state of vitality to witnesses; narratives further hint at the body’s status through word choice. Garrett Stewart points out the most recognized linguistic sign of death, the shift from a gendered pronoun to a neutered one. Stewart writes in his comprehensive study of language and death in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction, the “transposition from ‘him’ to ‘it’ is one of the most frequent stylistic devices in the Dickensian death scene,” a sort of “spiritual evisceration” (62). Unquestionably, Stewart points out and investigates an important linguistic sign of death in the novel. Even so, the bifurcated person/thing, it/she method of referring to the corpse is not the only language available for representation. In another mode, word choice signals the corpse’s removal from human activity and the sphere of being; the indefinite article, referring to a corpse’s parts as reference points (the hand) rather than referring to the corpse as an “it,” also signals death. The narrative breaks down the body into parts rather than referring to the whole body or whole person. In this way, the dead person becomes a catalogue of bits rather than an integrated body. Furthermore, the definite article seems to imply that the corpse, no longer inhabited by the person to who held a social place and was a whole being, is merely a shell, a non-personality. No longer is there a he or a she to move the body’s head or hand; instead, the hand that once “she” moved is now merely “the hand” that the narrative describes. Language reveals the corpse as a passive object of description rather than an active individual. Hence, Quilp is a passive “ugly plaything” with which the current “toyed and sported” and whose hair 56 becomes “[t]he hair, stirred by the damp breeze” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 512). This usage of “the” appears extensively throughout corpse descriptions, from the description of Nell’s pure and tranquil corpse to the bodies of those who died of emaciating and painful fevers in industrial novels. However, characters very rarely call a corpse “it” or refer to “the face” or “the hand.” Until the second half of the nineteenth century, characters usually apply gendered pronouns to the same corpses that the narrative describes using “it” and “the.” The transition between gendered pronouns and the definite article often occurs at the moment of death. In Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook (1839), Margaret holds a boy dying of fever: she . . . felt one more sigh from the little fellow on her lap. . . . This was the boy’s last breath. His head fell back, and the sunlight, which streamed in upon his half-closed eyes, could now disturb them no more. Margaret gently closed them, and laid the body on its little bed in the corner, straightening and covering the limbs before she turned away. (567) While alive, the boy’s limbs are his, implying a sense of ownership, that those body parts belong to a particular individual. Once dead, he becomes “the body”; his limbs become “the limbs.” His body and its parts no longer belong to him now that he is gone. This instance shows a clear, consistent, and comprehensible shift from gendered to non- gendered terms. This loss of ownership affects references not only to his body but also to his things: the little bed becomes its little bed. The use of the definite article in referring to the corpse differs from the use of the definite article when describing a living person’s body because the use of the definite article in reference to a living person is bracketed by the narrative’s use of a gendered pronoun (so “the hand” might still belong to a “her”). i When the object of description is a corpse, very rarely will there be a gendered pronoun 57 to bracket references using the definite article; “the hand” belongs to “the body” not to “him.” Word choice, then, reflects and reinforces the corpse’s status as a person and an individual by referring to the body using gendered pronouns or contrariwise denies the very same to that corpse by using definite articles or neutral pronoun (“it”) when describing the body. Narratives also apply this language of the dead to the dying body, thereby signaling its proximity to being a corpse. Word choice, in other words, can mark the still-living but nearly dead body as a corpse. Within close proximity to his death moment, the narrative’s description of Ben Davenport in Gaskell’s Mary Barton transforms him into a collection of parts: “The flesh was sunk, the features prominent” and at the death moment “The face grew beautiful . . . The hand was a heavy stiff weight on the wife’s head” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 94, 95). However, when referring to Davenport himself, not just a part of his body, the narrative uses “he” and “him”—“he could not speak, for his strength was ebbing” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 94). A narrative’s pronoun choice thus signals impending death and marks when the death occurs without depending upon phrases such as “and died” or “was dead.” For the most part, Charles Dickens’s novels explicitly aim to explore social problems and social anxieties as well as exhibit a high death count. His novels, then, should provide an intriguing and thorough exploration of death and social anxieties and thus deliver a limit test of modes of representing death and the dead body. Undeniably, there is no paucity of death in Charles Dickens’s novels. The novels include a dizzying array of deaths—good deaths, violently bad deaths, suicides, near deaths, death moments of many varieties (from explicit to euphemized), deaths in groups and singly, quite lengthy death scenes and deaths lacking a death scene (signaled by the discovery of a 58 corpse), and deaths of the wealthy to deaths of paupers. The multitude of deaths produces a variety of dead bodies—effaced and showcased, perfected and sundered, devoid of decomposition and stiffening in rigor mortis. Even so, dead bodies are not as plenteous as deaths, for the deaths appreciably outnumber the corpses. Out of sixty-nine deaths and corpses culled from thirteen novels, ii fifty deaths include a death scene. In twenty-six of these death scenes, the corpse vanishes at the death moment (in seventeen cases, euphemism or metaphor displaces the death) or there is no explicit reference to a corpse, and in seventeen there is at least one postmortem reference to a person or body. iii Nineteen cases include no death scene, and because these are found corpses, there is by necessity some postmortem reference to the dead person. However, twelve cases refer to the body using terms that avoid explicitly referring to the body as a corpse, thereby mitigating the shock of or deflecting attention away from the fact that the object being described is a corpse, while twelve cases refer explicitly to a dead body. iv Over all, twenty-nine cases refer to a “body” or some part of the remains, of which five cases refer only to a “body” and a mere eight make more than one reference to the corpse’s specific parts (hair, eyes, lips, and so on). In short, a little over one-half (forty) of the deaths avoid referring directly to a corpse (because the corpse vanishes or the narrative uses terms other than “corpse,” “body,” or various body parts) while twenty-nine refer to the corpse as such, without the use of deflecting pronouns or masking euphemisms and metaphors displacing the death moment and the corpse. v The mode of portraying the death is a significant factor in determining whether the dead body appears in the text. A physically epitomized manner of death, one in which the physical cause of death or the body’s manner of dying mirrors some aspect of the 59 character’s way of living, is likely to produce at least some reference to the corpse since the physical manner of death affects the corpse’s state. Quilp provides a primary instance of this rule, for as Garret Stewart suggests, “the epitomizing manner of his death caps his sadistic misanthropy in life” (61). In addition to his manner of dying (alone, his body violently battered by the elements) his body’s postmortem state (“a blazing ruin” of a battered corpse) echoes the ugliness of his life and manner of death. vi In a second mode of epitomizing death, the narrative’s mode of portraying the death scene supplies the epitome, primarily by displacing the death moment with a trope, most often euphemism or a character-appropriate metaphor. (Notably, about one-quarter of death scenes in Dickens’s novels lack explicit reference to a death moment.) The dying body and the corpse vanish or become obscured during the death scenes most clearly framed by displacement. The tropes that displace the death moment begin by erasing the dying body and ultimately expunge the dead body from the text, a representational maneuver plainly illustrated in Barkis’s death scene. The narrative signals Barkis’s death by encapsulating his character with his signature idiom, uttered one last time (“‘Barkis is willin’”), and expressing his death moment with an appropriate sea metaphor (“it being low water, he went out with the tide”) (Dickens, David Copperfield 608). Both idiom and metaphor displace the last moment. vii A third mode of representing the death moment eschews displacing tropes and often concludes the scene with multiple references to the corpse. A condensed, relatively unelaborated statement conveys Sikes’s accidental self-hanging: “He fell for five-and- thirty feet. There was a sudden jerk, a terrific convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife clenched in his stiffening hand” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 549). Sikes’s 60 death by hanging is a fitting one—his fate should he have been captured—but it does not seem to epitomize his character or way of living. Making no attempt to euphemize the death or otherwise shield the reader from the corpse, the narrative makes several references to the dead body—the “stiffening hand,” “the dangling body,” and “The murderer [that] swung lifeless against the wall” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 549). viii The epitomizing styles of death outnumber this latter mode of relatively straightforward depiction. In general, then, Dickens’s styles of depicting death tend to displace the death moment, even in those cases where there is some reference to the corpse after the death. Those portrayals that lack death-displacing metaphors also lay bare the corpse, but in a significant number of death scenes wherein the narrative effaces or displaces the death moment, the corpse too is expunged, leaving no dead body to represent. In addition to the displacement and erasure of the death moment and corpse, Dickens’s style of depicting death scenes obscures the horror of the dying body. Many of the dying characters express or experience very little pain or discomfort in their last days and hours while their bodies manifest little sign of the strain of illness. ix There are very few bodies twisted by fits, horribly wasted bodies, cadaverous forms, sunken cheeks, or faces ravaged by pain. Even when the point of depicting a death scene is to convey the pain and fear of the dying individual, rather than describing the body itself, the narratives use metaphors that displace the image of the body’s dissolution and obscure the agonized body. Jo the crossing-sweep’s death in Bleak House presents perhaps the best example of this. The dying boy initiates the metaphor himself, telling Doctor Woodcourt that his breath “‘draws . . . as heavy as a cart . . . and rattles like it’” (Dickens, Bleak House 874). The omniscient narrator continues this cart metaphor, which stands in for the boy’s 61 diseased breathing that rattles like a cart, and uses it to trace Jo’s corporeal dissolution. x The starving pauper body, racked by severe pulmonary disease is thus doubly displaced; illness replaces the body it afflicts (the disease defines the body) even as a metaphor replaces the illness. Appropriate as it is, the cart-as-breath/life/body metaphor deflects attention away from the emaciated boy’s actual body. Dickens’s descriptions of dying by illness, if there is any reference to the body’s state, most frequently consist of brief, generalized references to the body’s emaciation without specifying what profound pain and emaciation do to the person or the body over time. xi For the most part, it seems, explicit representation of the dying body’s state, its physical dissolution and agony, have little or no place in Dickens’s narratives. Further effacing the effect of dying upon the body, Dickens’s death scenes seldom remark upon the future corpse’s inscription on the dying person’s face and body, essentially eliding the body made cadaverous by the strain of illness and pain. Of the three instances in which death announces its imminence on the dying person’s face or body, two cases generally assert death’s inscription, neither giving the reader any idea about what death’s mark looks like. In “The Old Man’s Tale about the Queer Client,” “‘[i]t was plain to those who looked upon the mother’s altered face, that death must soon close the scene of her adversity and trial,’” and the narrator remarks of Mr. Dolls in Our Mutual Friend, “Death had marked him: ‘Mine’” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers, 405; Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 713). Only one case explicitly describes death’s mark but in doing so frames the death look like a well-deserved punishment. The storyteller of “The Stroller’s Tale” relates the pantomime actor’s death-look by describing only parts of the 62 face, “indicating . . . strongly the ravages of the disease,” leaving the reader with a horrible vision of one man’s physical dissolution: ‘The last four-and-twenty hours had produced a frightful alteration. The eyes, though deeply sunk and heavy, shone with a lustre frightful to behold. The lips were parched, and cracked in many places; the hard, dry skin glowed with a burning heat; and there was an almost unearthly air of wild anxiety in the man’s face.’ (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 66) xii The witness notes death’s proximity in the progression of the disease’s ravages upon the flesh and the psyche. Notably, the death-in-life ruination of the actor’s face and body is a form of punishment for his bad living. The actor is not an innocent and beloved person whose dissolution into a tortured death pains the reader; on the contrary, this actor’s death scene exemplifies the bad death, which is a fitting death. Another element of death uncommon in the Dickensian death scene is any portrayal of the painful shift from living body to corpse. Certainly, Dickens does describe the effect of fatal physical violence upon the body—Carker’s “mutilated fragments,” Stephen Blackpool’s “form, almost without form,” Tigg Montague’s body’s becoming merely blood “sopping and soaking . . . oozing down,” Nancy’s becoming but a “pool of gore that quivered and danced.” However, there are but two instances that describe the shift of living body to corpse at the death moment. The first is explicit and terrible, the second a romanticized version of death as an agent that removes time’s mark on the body. In The Pickwick Papers, when a woman dies in her husband’s arms, “‘the arm that clasped his neck grew stiff and heavy. A deep sigh escaped from the wasted form before him; the lips moved, and a smile played upon the face; but the lips were lips were pallid, and the smile faded into a rigid and ghastly stare’” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 406). This woman does not complain in her last moments, and she thanks God for her affliction. 63 Nevertheless, her smile disturbingly metamorphoses into a “rigid and ghastly stare,” and her corpse is shocking rather than soothing. In contrast, death does not mar William Dorrit’s countenance in his last moments but erases life’s struggles and cares as “Quietly, quietly, the ruled and cross-ruled countenance on which they [the lines] were traced, became fair and blank” (Dickens, Little Dorrit 924). Both versions of becoming dead are somewhat melodramatic, one over-emphasizing death rigor, which makes the corpse horrible, the other conversely over-emphasizing loss of muscle tension, rendering the almost-dead body soothing. In general, the dying body, whether it placidly awaits its fate or struggles horribly, does not seem to play a prominent role in Dickens’s death scenes. Like the dying body and the physical effects of dying, the dead body is best left undescribed. The best place for a corpse in a narrative is nowhere, unless it is either a smiling or gruesome one that deserves its fate. When the corpse does appear, the narrative frequently declines to linger, making very few references to the actual body, and survivors tend to eschew the corpse. When survivors do touch the dead body, it is primarily for investigatory or policing purposes (Mr. Inspector raises the Gaffer’s first clenched around a silver piece, the arresting officers attempt to pry Jonas Chuzzlewit’s hands from the poison bottle, and servants remove Tulkinghorn’s body from his office, presumably for an inquest) or in order to cover or remove the body (authorities covers Carker’s “mutilated fragments;” Sikes covers, then uncovers, Nancy’s body; Esther covers Jenny’s dead infant; and one man cuts down Ralph Nickleby’s hanging corpse). Often those survivors who do handle the body as part of a loving gesture are denying that the body is dead. In The Old Curiosity Shop, Nell’s grandfather denies that she is dead even as he holds her “languid arm” and cold, and the scholar persists in holding the little 64 scholar’s hand, even though “[i]t was but the hand of a dead child” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 735, 199). Apart from cases of denial, death scenes do not portray the survivors’ attempts to maintain, even briefly, a place for the dead in the community through various gestures and social obligations, such as washing, caring for, kissing, and expressing love and grief for the departed. If the corpse does not vanish at the moment of death, survivors concern themselves with making the corpse disappear, by covering or removing it, or otherwise distancing themselves from it. Mrs. Joe’s husband and patient nurse do not kiss her corpse, nor does Pip describe the laying out of Mrs. Joe’s body. Unlike well-loved Nell Trent, Mrs. Joe is not an intensely loved person over whose body the survivors linger and weep. The funeral scene is more involved with the absurdities and pomp of the “respectable” Victorian funeral than moments of tenderness and community generated around the corpse. In general, survivors and corpses have little to do with one another apart from the processes of investigation and when removing a body from the scene by covering it or physically removing it from the room, which also removes the corpse referentially from the narrative. The best corpse, it seems, is a vanished one, just as the best death is a euphemized one. There are a few lengthy explorations of the dead body’s state in Dickens’s novels. Of the five lengthy or extensive descriptions of the corpse, only one uses explicit language of the dead body (Quilp). Two use the language associated with the living when referring to the body. Nell is always a “she,” her corpse is very un-corpse like, and never does she become an “it,” a “corpse,” or “dead body”; Gaffer’s corpse is “him” and “Father” even as the elements grotesquely play about and upon his dead body. In both cases, the dead are loved and so do not become mere things. In two instances, the 65 narrative uses language of death to refer to two people who are not corpses at all (Eugene Wrayburn and Rogue Riderhood). These latter two examples are extraordinary instances of stylistic trickery wherein the narrator’s word choice misleads the reader into believing that still-living bodies are corpses, a stratagem that heightens reader tension but one which is very rarely found in death scenes in industrial novels. xiii The narrator’s depiction of Eugene Wrayburn’s near-death beating and near drowning exemplifies how pronoun use frames the reader’s understanding of the body’s vital status even while confounding reader trust in such language. The narrative’s word choice shifts from “him” to “it” as the body appears to be dead and back from “it” to “him” when the body seems to be alive. When Lizzie initially sees Wrayburn’s body in the river, she notes the body “rise to the surface, slightly struggle, and [. . .] turn over on its back” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 685). Though still alive, he is already an “it,” a living dead body. In this same paragraph, Wrayburn is an “it” five times and moves from being the “figure” to “the body,” both terms that Dickens sometimes uses to refer to dead bodies. The reader knows who this it- body is, having been a witness to the beating. The combination of knowing Headstone’s murderous intent in beating Wrayburn and the language applied to this body, which renders it already a corpse, leads the reader to expect Eugene’s death. Eugene, that is, is already all but dead, his body an it-body, its vitality seeping out into the river (“It was insensible, if not virtually dead; it was mutilated, and streaked the water all about it with dark red streaks”) (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 685). Once Lizzie secures the body, having “lashed it safe,” she also secures the possibility of its survival. The text reflects this hope for the near-dead body in restoring gendered status to Wrayburn’s body (“He had fearful wounds”). Initially, word choice clearly signals to the reader that this is a 66 corpse, but afterwards, the language shifts between the language of the dead and the language of the living. This is not the result of a character’s misapprehending the state of a body but rather the narrator deliberately misleading the reader in order to heighten tensions: Is this a corpse or a live body? Will Wrayburn die, has he already died? At the same time, this most riveting depiction of a dead body is not the depiction of a dead body at all. xiv Death scenes have many functions in Dickens’s novels—such as to exemplify a fitting end, shift the plot’s course, change character behavior—but rarely if ever are the causes and trajectory of the dying process and the death (including the body’s experience during dying and its transformation at the death moment) among the reasons for a death’s occurrence. In the industrial novel, the death and the corpse work not only within the novel, on characters and plots, but also on the readers as part of the genre’s larger purpose, that of educating readers about the condition of the laboring classes by exposing the injurious, even lethal, effects of living and working conditions upon bodies and families. In the preface to The Wrongs of Woman, Charlotte Tonna explains that her purpose in writing a novel about laborers is to reveal the actual wrongs sustained by those of our sex whose lot has been, providentially, so cast as to render their life necessarily one of labour: and so to fix their [the reader’s] attention upon this interesting, helpless class, and to rouse the best feelings of womanly nature. (Tonna, Wrongs of Woman 10) Tonna’s novel aims specifically to reveal and elucidate the wrongs of women laborers, ultimately designing to “rouse the best feelings” of the readers by exposing them to scenes of which they are most likely ignorant. The same intention can be said to function in other industrial novels as well—namely, to expose readers the condition of the 67 laboring classes. By transcribing what Frances Trollope in the preface to The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy describes as “scenes of outrage and lawless violence” instigated and controlled by cruel factory owners, these novels seek both to reveal and reverse the complaisance of the middle and upper classes who fail to demand sufficient legislative control over the industries (Trollope iv). In order to educate their readers, the industrial novels take readers into hovels, slums, and factories, showing them scenes that are painful but nevertheless fit and, above all, necessary for them to witness. If the industrial novels aim to probe and expose the conditions of the laboring classes, then they must measure the body’s health, which is integral to those conditions. After all, the laborer’s body is his capital; bones, muscle, sinew, and flesh are bargained and spent in exchange for means to purchase sustenance for that body. One the one hand, unemployment hunts the laborer, threatening indigence, starvation, and death. As Engels points out in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844, employment is contingent upon “every breeze that blows, every whim of his employer, every bad turn of trade” (26). The laborer “knows that, though he may have the means of living to-day, it is very uncertain whether he shall to-morrow” (Engels 61). The body that bargains and expends its labor-power today may waste away tomorrow, and the body that wastes away today may starve to death for lack of sustenance within weeks. Employment also leads to poor health, starvation, disease, and premature death. In Capital (1867), Karl Marx poignantly points out that the capitalist mode of production—embodied in factory work, the division of labor, the incessant technological progression and the concomitant stress upon laborers to increase productivity (and capital) by intensifying their labor and 68 prolonging the working-day—produces “the deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and function” (Marx 253). Inadequate pay engenders starvation and squalid living conditions while forced intensification of productivity, longer work-days, and insufficient rest wear down the body. Furthermore, the factory’s enslavement of the laborer not only neglects to sustain labor-power but also expends that labor—and the laborer’s vitality—at an ever- increasing rate. Poor living and working conditions exacerbate the laborer’s already bad condition by decreasing his capacity to labor and earn wages for sustenance, hence rendering his body more susceptible to illness and death. Indeed, Marx points out, “It is precisely among the work people of modern industry that we meet with the shortest duration of life” (601). Industrial novels and reports from special commissions investigating the condition of the laboring classes document instances of laborer’s bodies so ravaged by their daily toil that they actually do resemble corpses. The laboring body’s apparent corpseliness points to its shortened life span. In Charlotte Tonna’s The Wrongs of Woman, the farmer’s daughter Ann King, sent to a London “French” milliner’s, sees “a first-hand . . . [who] has laid herself down on a heap of gaudy cuttings, and might pass for a corpse, only that her quick heavy breathing proves it is sleep, not death” (Tonna 22). David Young, a surgeon whom Thomas Tancred interviewed for his report to the second Royal Commission on Children’s Employment in Mines and Manufactories (1843), observes of dye-workers, “when away from work, except a little colour in the lips, and the eyes not being glazed, they are little different in appearance from corpses” (i6). These interpretations of the living body as corpse are neither careless nor mistaken; these bodies, sufficiently “worked down” and 69 poisoned by their working environment, are all but corpses. England’s economy depended to a great extent upon the laborer’s beleaguered body, these corpse-like forms depleted of vitality by their labor. Consequently, the condition of the worker’s body is of great importance both to the living condition of the laboring classes and the economy of the bourgeoisie and upper classes who profit from that body and must pay to sustain that body through the Poor Law rates when the worker’s labor cannot. Part of the endeavor to lay bare the crushing nature of industrial labor and appalling living conditions is documenting the impact of these conditions—measured in illness, disease, and corpses—on laboring and pauper bodies. In conventional representation of the good death scene, easing or eliding representation of death’s work on the body is requisite, for who can comfortably contemplate a death scene that centers on a body dying of an excruciating illness? Neither the witnesses nor the readers can feel soothed about a character’s death if she expires in unalloyed agony or delirium and leaves a body made horrible by disease. The extent of an illness’s effect on the body in many a conventional death scene merely consists of genteel wasting or emaciation, if the depiction has not already effaced or displaced the dying and dead body. In contrast, because part of the industrial novels’ work is to expose the brutality and death resulting from the conditions of industrialism (which determine not only how the laborers work in the factory but also how they live outside of the factory), death scenes very seldom efface the tormented dying or the decomposing dead body; these novels necessarily are replete with the cadaverous bodies of over-worked and under-paid laborers, children and adults. This is not to suggest that the industrial novels feature more death scenes than other novels—the body count in Dickens’s works defies such a claim. Even so, although not 70 entirely without tinges of melodrama and the good death/bad death framework, industrial novels tend to take a more naturalistic approach to representing the dying and dead body by exposing the dying body in pain and the dead body seized by decomposition (not merely algor mortis, acceptable in conventional death scenes, but flesh-distorting rigor mortis). Further departing from conventional ways of representing death, some death scenes avoid metaphorical language that might shield the reader from the horror and strangeness of death by obscuring the death moment and corpse. In addition, the industrial novel’s death scenes are more realistic in so far as the narratives convey the process of dying and death using the language of everyday life instead of the metaphorical language of the good death framework that distracts the reader from the dying and dead body. Sometimes death is just death, neither good nor bad in terms of how the person adheres to the good death formula, although the death can be set on a spectrum of good or bad in terms of pain and suffering. In these cases, the corpse is not a sign of continuity and beatitude but merely a damaged physical remnant. Admittedly, the good death does occur in industrial novels, occasionally producing a corpse lovely and calming to gaze upon, yet even here the dying stage of the good death often is marked by pain and delirium upsetting to witness. Even when someone manages to die a good death, generally accomplished by a last-moment vision of heaven or tenacious piety in the face of terrible pain, she ends her days in the maw of painful wasting from overwork or contagious diseases. While conventional good deaths are instructive, providing a paradigm of dying well and reaching beatitude, those deaths produced by factory overwork and squalid living rarely perform such an informing 71 service for the witness. Such deaths afford the reader a lesson on the living and dying conditions of the laboring and pauper classes. In the industrial novel, metaphors are few and corpses are many. This is not to say that all deaths are gruesomely realistic nor that the reader will encounter horribly detailed descriptions—diarrhea, vomit, incontinence, bed sores, and gangrene. Rather, the narratives less frequently efface the body and the symptoms (physical and behavioral) of the body’s disease. Industrial novels are numerous. Many feature striking examples of corpse representation, too many to survey without unproductive repetition. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s remarkable novel on industrial relations between laborers and capitalists, clearly and movingly illustrates the profound difficulty of dying the good death in the industrial town and as such, provides a most profitable subject of analyses. The sufficiently large number of deaths among men, women, and children of a range of ages and from a variety of causes in Mary Barton make possible, in a single novel, representational variation in types and modes of death as well as varying levels of specificity and realism in corpse representation. xv The good death is elusive for the factory workers and their families, but they are not impious people whose delirium and pain, or even their deaths, are fitting or deserved. These are a people for whom the circumstances of dying confound their attempts to die well. Indeed, for several of these dying bodies, there is no possible choice between dying well and dying badly, for the sheer physical circumstances of disease disallow such choice. Revealing how the body influences or disables volition, the novel questions to what extent the dying can control how they end. Gaskell’s novel also explores the dead body’s place in the death scene. For Gaskell, the death scene does not end at the death 72 moment—as it does even in some industrial novels wherein the last glimpse the reader receives of the body is the smiling or stiffening corpse. Instead of withdrawing at the death moment, the narrative records how the witnesses treat the corpse and their varying ways of understanding the death. Even so, despite the uncontrollability of disease and potential horror of the corpse, survivors do not shun the dead body but rather attempt to fulfill their obligations to the dead by laying out the body and endeavoring to understand the corpse’s relation to the now-dead person. These death scenes offer a more realistic portrayal of death in addition to showing the lower class’s devotion to the dead that ensures, at least for a while, that the dead continue to have a place in the community from which they have been torn. Each death scene thus demonstrates that Gaskell seriously engages questions of dying, death, and the corpse’s place in the community. The less gentle representation of corpses in Mary Barton, portraying the distortions that occur after death, approximate the real body’s postmortem state. The first death in the novel rejects convention’s effaced or beautified corpse, even though the corpse is a beloved one. The description of Mrs. Barton’s body after her death in childbirth shows death’s ugliness where under similar circumstances other novels smooth over the horror by omitting references to how death alters the body. Of the two Dickens novels in which a woman dies in childbirth, Dombey and Son avoids any description of Fanny Dombey’s corpse, and the representation of Agnes Fleming’s body in Oliver Twist (1837-39) shuns signs of physical trauma. In contrast, Mrs. Barton’s body is a distressing sight to her survivors, a psychological trauma because the dead body signifies loss of wife and mother and a visual trauma because the loved woman’s face has been distorted by death. Mary sees that “her [mother’s] face was swollen,” but a prolonged look reveals 73 more as “She looked on the face so changed, and yet so strangely like” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 22). Agony changes the face so long loved and well known, rendering it strange to Mary, no longer her mother’s face but another that is like and yet “so changed.” Word choice signals to the reader that Mrs. Barton is dead without directly announcing that this is a corpse. After looking at “her face,” Mary “bent down to kiss it” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 34). Here Mary’s realization coincides with the narrative’s announcement that the body is a corpse through a shift from a gendered possessive pronoun, indicating that this face belongs to somebody, to the definite article, which signals that the face is a facsimile of her face, the face of the living mother. This corpse is no perfected corpse, like Nell Trent’s body “unaltered in its change,” but one so changed that it is strangely like and, implicitly, strangely unlike. It is not uncommon for witnesses to require physical tests, such as touching to body, to determine whether a body is dead since so often a dead body does not look like a corpse. Sight alone clearly reveals to Mary that she gazes upon her mother’s dead body, for in this novel sleep and death do not quietly intertwine. Touching the body does not serve to confirm suspicion but instead provokes horror. “The cold unyielding flesh,” implying algor mortis and rigor mortis so soon after the death, “struck a shudder to her heart” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 22). Swollen, changed face, cold and stiff flesh, an “it” rather than a “she”—this corpse is no object of beauty to be contemplated and read for signs of grace. This is unalloyed death. There is no truly model good death in Mary Barton, although many of the novel’s deaths do occur in the context of a deathbed scene, and most manifest some signs of the good death. Each example questions the applicability of such a standard in the context of the circumstances of dying from illness or disease, circumstances including environment, 74 bodily symptoms, and resulting physical, behavioral, psychological alterations. In the conventional good death scene, the dying person chooses to wait quietly and calmly for death rather than enacting any struggle in body or mind against the inevitable. In this novel, placidly waiting to die is not a choice. Placidity requires an improbably compliant illness or the wealth to purchase palliatives sufficiently powerful to ease physical discomfort, a purchasing power factory workers certainly lacked. xvi The dying lack volition not because of any failings of piety or personal strength but because of limits established and enforced by the physical circumstances of dying that severely restrict a person’s capacity to choose a way of dying. There is no clear-cut bifurcation of death scenes between the good death and bad death. Death scenes and corpse bear some and lack other marks of the conventional good death. Refusing to adhere solely to either formula of representing death and the corpse, these death scenes reveal a more complex and realistic insight into the process of dying, socially and physically, than the idealized and unrealistic good death narrative. By revealing problems of volition that age and illness generate, the Wilson twins’ death scene points to the trouble with the good death formula. This scene seriously questions a child’s capacity to exert the volition necessary to adhere to good death precepts; the dying twins are too young to enact a psychological struggle and victory over the physical circumstances of disease. The young boys who fall ill from “the same heavy stupor of suffering” have no access to a placid way of death, for their death is not one in which sleep slips quietly into death and eliminates the pain of becoming dead (Gaskell, Mary Barton 75). When Mary Barton comes upon their death scene, she finds one twin already dead while the remaining twin is a “sick death-like boy” who struggles to live, 75 “troubled, gasping” and soon “gasped louder, longer, with more effort” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 76). For the dying body, the last moments involve a struggle of body and disease without the interference of visions of heaven, angelic voices, music from above, or other such devices that ease the dying. The boy’s death diverges from the child’s good death pattern in that he is in the throes of an illness without recourse to being good or being bad. There is no choosing to die in a certain way; illness and the body, not the child, decide how the body dies. In the end, “Nature’s struggles were soon exhausted, and he breathed his little life away in peace” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 77; emphasis added). Nature, the body and the disease, control the death. The Wilson boy’s dying in peace is attributable to his body’s exhaustion, a cessation of physical struggle, whereas the way in which other children die of illness, according to the conventional good death pattern, is dependent upon their ability to die placidly and uncomplaining. Neither the living nor the dying can actually exert control over the way of death, yet folk belief enables the living to imagine that they participate in the determining the manner of death. In the witnesses’ approach to interpreting the death scene, framed by folk belief, the struggle of will occurs not within the dying body but within the witnesses whose refusal to relinquish their loved one to death seems to retard the death moment. According to Alice, Jane Wilson’s “wishing” her child not to die actually causes the boy to “‘have a hard struggle for the quiet of death’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 76). When Jane Wilson struggles with her “wishing,” her son’s “struggles seemed to increase,” but once Jane Wilson gives up her “wishing” and gives up her dying child to Alice, the remaining twin dies (Gaskell, Mary Barton 76; emphasis added). The narrative does not imply that Mrs. Wilson’s “wishing” actually does affect the boy’s death (since the boy’s struggles 76 only seem to increase during the wishing, and death occurs only after nature’s struggles cease), but witnesses believe and hence perceive that they can affect the manner of death and the death moment’s timing. While the survivors tell themselves and each other that they affect death’s way and time, the narrative implies that no one can influence death except the disease and the body’s ability to struggle against it. The death scene’s continuation even after the child’s last breath strikingly exemplifies how the living can embrace and re-incorporate the dead into their lives, even if for only for a brief time. Furthermore, the description of the Wilson twins’ corpses does not imply a splitting of the person between dead shell and ever-living personality or soul, but neither do the boys become things. The first twin is “the dead body of the other twin,” “the little body,” and “it” and a “him.” Alice tries to “carry to its old accustomed bed in its parents’ room,” but his father “took his dead son . . . and carried him upstairs as if afraid of wakening him” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 77). The use of “it” does not seem to imply depersonalization since the next sentence refers to the boy as “him.” This dead child still belongs to someone; he is still his father’s son. After the second boy’s death, “Again Alice laid out the dead, Mary helping with reverent fear. The father and mother carried him upstairs to the bed, where his little brother lay in calm repose” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 77). The narrating voice shifts between seeming depersonalization, calling the boy “the dead,” and maintaining social continuity by referring to “[t]he father and mother” and “his little brother.” The dead still belong to the living and to each other. Dead twins are still brothers, and dead children still have parents. Continuity here is through social gestures of caring for the dead instead of through the medium of storytelling or the spectacle of the perfect unchanging corpse. The use of “it” indicates 77 discontinuity (the boy is an “it,” no longer a boy) while “he” suggests social continuity. Still a “he,” the dead boy maintains a place in relation to the living. The dead are no longer specific people and yet maintain their place in the social fabric, at least temporarily; thus, “the dead child” can still be “his son.” Although the Wilson twins die a painful death and cannot adhere to good death precepts, the survivors do not reject or distance themselves from their corpses. Watching the good death successfully enacted by a dying person is not a luxury accessible to the poor for whom easeful death is a blessed rarity and who have little or no access to palliative agents that smooth death’s course. The poor find comfort not in watching a good death but in caring for the dead and re- incorporating them into their lives for a brief time by creating a community of the living and dead. Despite their greater capacity to control themselves, adults also fail to adhere to the model good death formula, again through no fault of their own. Adults are perhaps no less vulnerable than children to the reduction of self to pure physical struggle when an illness’s symptoms intensify to such an extent that the mind surrenders to the body’s morbidity. Mary Barton points to the improbability, if not impossibility, that a person dying of fever can overcome delirium and pain through self-discipline in order to behave well on the deathbed, neither complaining, nor showing pain, nor forgetting to confess, forgive, and pray. Davenport’s death from typhus reveals the extent to which illness can render all but impossible adherence to the good death’s demanding precepts. The deathbed scene occurs in a fetid-smelling dark cellar, and the illness is a product of living conditions, “brought on by miserable living, filthy neighborhood, and great depression of mind and body” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 61). Davenport does not, indeed cannot, placidly 78 wait to die as his body slides gently into death. Instead, behaving like a bad or immoral man does in more conventional depictions of dying, such as Dickens’s pantomime actor, he “cursed and swore, which surprised Wilson, who knew his piety in health, and who did not know the unbridled tongue of delirium” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 65). In the grips of a painful fever, the pious man becomes impious rather than learning greater patience and purity through his suffering. Nevertheless, this does not occur because Davenport is a bad man or because he gives in to temptation. There are no battles for the soul here, no purity or impurity, only disease. Davenport spends no time plumbing his depths in the processes of recognition, acceptance, confession, and purification, for the delirium leaves him without the capacity to enact good death precepts. Gaskell does not palliate her portrayal of fever’s effect on behavior, and neither does the novel eschew the future cadaver’s encroachment on the face of the dying. Barton, who has been watching Davenport, tells Wilson, who has just returned from a failed attempt to procure a place for Davenport in the fever ward, “‘There’s a change comed over him sin’ yo left, is there not?’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). Looking at the dying man, Wilson sees that “The flesh was sunk, the features prominent, bony, and rigid. The fearful clay-colour of death was over all. But the eyes were open and sensitive, though the films of the grave were setting upon them” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). The disease makes a corpse of the body before it is dead. There are even stages of decomposition apparent in this still-living body—the fixity of impending rigor mortis (rigid features) and the clouding of corneas that occurs soon after death (“films of the grave”). Davenport’s face is cadaverous, his flesh drained of vitality, and his eyes indicate his still-extant perceptual capacity (being “open and sensitive”) even as 79 premature onset of cornea cloudiness apparently deadens that perception. This is not a case of euphemistic language seen in North and South when Mary sees that “Death had signed her [mother] for his own” or a case of a body looking like a corpse (Gaskell, North and South 154). This body is a living corpse. Like Mrs. Barton’s shockingly swollen face, Davenport’s body shows readers a more naturalistic portrayal (though it is one that quickens postmortem signs to emphasize the agony of dying) of how dying and death affect the body. Davenport’s dying is neither good nor bad but merely exemplifies what happens to the person and the body burdened with fever. However, at the last moment before death, the depiction slips into the good death mode as Davenport “brought (with jerking convulsive effort) his two hands into the attitude of prayer,” thanking God for his impending death (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). Unlike conventional good death scenes, this dying man does not exhort his witnesses to good behavior or make pious speeches for an audience. Rather, he prays for himself, not impiously, for he does thank God that death is to release him from life’s agony. Mrs. Davenport wails “‘have you no thought for me? O Ben! Ben! Do say one word to help me through life,’” but he remains silent, having lost the ability to speak until resurrection (“The trump of the archangel would set his tongue free”) (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). This man is already dead—bereft of sight and speech, his body corpselike before his death, a body without senses, a face without life. Even his hand is all but a corpse’s, being “it” rather than “the hand.” At the death moment, there is no everlasting gentle smile on his face (already described in the language of death as “it” and “the”), but Ben Davenport does at last receive a last silent revelation, a vision of heaven, indicated by the change that comes over him when “[t]he face grew beautiful, as 80 the soul neared God. A peace beyond understanding came over it” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). The narrative euphemizes the death moment with the phrase “the soul neared God” rather than writing that he “fell back and died” or “was dead,” but the narrative does not minimize or omit the corpse as it continues the death scene beyond that last moment. Using the language of the dead, the narrative immediately differentiates the corpse from the survivors and the once-living man. Just as the face becomes an “it” of a corpse, rigor mortis immediately seizes the rest of the body as “The hand was a heavy stiff weight on the wife’s head” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). Davenport is no longer “him,” Mrs. Davenport is no longer “his” wife (she is “the wife”), and no longer does the dead man own his body (his hand and face are “the” and “it” rather than “his”). As in the Wilson twins’ death scene, Davenport’s death scene narrative does not end at the death but continues on to explore the community’s caring for the dead: “They reverently laid out the corpse—Wilson fetching his only spare shirt to array it in” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 72). Davenport is no longer Davenport; that man is gone, leaving only an “it,” a corpse without gender or name. Dead, he owns nothing, not even his corpse. For the Wilsons, there seems to be some comfort in lovingly laying out their dead children in their own beds. For Davenport’s survivors, the case is bleaker. The only comfort in losing a husband, father, and breadwinner is that he, at least, is released from the squalor of his living conditions. “No more grief or sorrow for him,” the narrative notes directly after his death (Gaskell, Mary Barton 72). The “him” refers not to the corpse or any being in the afterlife; “him” refers to the once-living man. There is “No more grief or sorrow for him” now that he is dead, now that there is no longer a “him,” a being to feel grief or sorrow. The deaths of adults that occur in the industrial novel do not 81 often produce corpses lovely to look upon but do grant the survivors relief that at last no longer shall there be hunger, cold, or suffering for that person now dead. Davenport’s own last words are a prayer of thankfulness, “‘Oh Lord God! I thank thee, that the hard struggle of living is over’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 71). Davenport’s death is “good” because life has ceased. Living as a laborer in a factory town is torment while comfort comes in the cessation of living, when at last there will no longer be filth, starvation, disease, and hard, ill-paid labor. For the readers, the death exemplifies the brute hardship of dying and demonstrates the fallacy of placid death. For the witnesses, the corpse signifies a possibility of painless non-existence and in that sense, does bring a sense of peace to the dead and the survivors. The body points to both a surplus of pain (causing death) and the possibility of painlessness (in death). Volition and self discipline play no part in the one instance of prolonged dying that does approximate the model good death. Alice dies an old woman, after a good life full of good deeds. In life, Alice Wilson conducts herself consistently according to her “firm faith.” Upon her deathbed, seized by a by a dementia that replaces her present awareness with her childhood memories, Alice no longer is capable of choosing to continue her mode of living in her mode of dying. The dementia precludes self- purification (confessions, repentance, and forgiveness), pious last sayings, and exhortation to moral betterment. No longer aware of her present circumstances, Alice no longer speaks in “that constant earnest reference to God and His holy word . . . and there were no deathbed words of exhortation from the lips of one so habitually pious” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 339). According to good death principles, Alice’s deviation from the precepts of pious speeches or struggle towards worthiness should disqualify her from 82 access to eternal reward. Even so, Alice demonstrates other behavioral markers of the good death. Precisely because she remains unconscious of the events occurring around her, “[imagining] herself once again in the happy, happy realms of childhood,” she expresses neither distress (Mary notes “‘How happy she is!’”) nor concern about her physical weakness (Gaskell, Mary Barton 339, 270). Furthermore, her last words are not entirely bereft of pious sentiment, for she at last utters an entreaty for a blessing, “‘Mother, good-night! Dear mother! Bless me once more! I’m very tired and would fain go to sleep,’” and like Davenport who speaks no more after his thankful prayer to God, Alice “never spoke again on this side of heaven” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 339). Although this is a blessing begged from the dying to the dead rather than begging for God’s blessing, Alice’s words associate sleep and death, signaling a peaceful approach to death, spoken from a time of innocence, her childhood. Finally, by incapacitating Alice’s memory of her struggles as an adult and her knowledge of her own imminent death, dementia returns Alice back to her time of childhood innocence, hence purifying her. As Davenport’s death scene demonstrates, adherence to the good death formula is nearly unattainable when dying of fever or otherwise painful or delirium-inducing illness, which robs the dying of consistent lucidity and volition. Alice Wilson’s malady is the cause of her inability to conform entirely to the good death formula, not because of pain—despite her earlier paralytic stroke, Alice is dying “without pain”—but because of the dementia. Alice possesses neither the capacity nor awareness of the need to exert self-discipline in the endeavor to die well. Ironically, it is this effacement of the body’s struggle and the mind’s knowledge of imminent death that makes possible this approximation of the model good death. 83 Alice’s body disappears from her lengthy dying process, so too her death scene effaces the corpse. Alice’s corpse does not function as a calming image for her loved ones but rather vanishes from the text after a curt sentence indicates her death, “She died the day after their [Jem and Mary’s] return from Liverpool” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 339). Like the absence of struggle towards self-purification, dying speeches, and last prayers for others, the lack of a smiling corpse or even a dying body that in its last moments is transformed by a glimpse of heaven or a “peace beyond understanding” would seem to indicate that this is not a model good death. However, in Alice’s case the dying body performs the functions that a beautiful corpse does, rendering the beautiful corpse an unnecessary addition. Alice need not become a corpse in order for her body to be beautiful and soothing. In cases of the model good death, death initiates the body’s journey back to innocence, illustrated in the erasure of life’s toil and care from the body. Alice’s dying body already manifests the physical mark of such a journey, for Alice’s way of death is a way back into youth as her dementia carries her “once more in the scenes of her childhood,” her physical illness infuses her face with “the rosy colour, absent from her face since the days of childhood,” and her face “seemed to have become much more youthful during the painless approach to death” as well as being “illumined” by a “bright happy look” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 215, 339). The beautiful corpse’s perfected face calms the bereaved; while dying Alice “diffused an atmosphere of peace around her. . . . [and] loud passionate feeling could no longer endure in the calm of her presence” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 339). The lovely corpse is not needed here since the dying body already has provided all that her corpse would have provided her survivors. Alice’s very life, her consistent “firm faith,” is a lesson in good behavior and pious 84 living. Witnesses need not see the approach of beatitude reflected in the dying woman’s face, for her dying body itself is a sign of beatitude. The reader already knows that the corpse will be beautiful and calming because the dying body already demonstrates those qualities. Indeed, Alice’s “work here was finished and faithfully done” during life and during her sinking towards death, even without having to speak good words to her witnesses or showing a beautiful corpse (Gaskell, Mary Barton 336). In Alice’s example of the good death, the narrative excises the corpse and concentrates upon the dying body. In Harry’s case, the narrative excises the death scene and concentrates upon the corpse. Harry’s mode of death is and yet is not a good death; the corpse is both a beautified and a natural dead body. According to the good death formula, Harry Carson dies a bad death, for “death had come too instantaneously to give any previous pain” and as such came “too instantaneously” to allow for good words, good deeds, and good dying (Gaskell, Mary Barton 210). Thus while Harry Carson dies violently and cannot repair the harm he has done in life, the state of his corpse— displaying postmortem perfection rather than a shattered skull or at least a fixed or gruesome death-look—implies his death is a good one. Most astoundingly and improbably, although Harry Carson has been shot in the head, there is no shattered bone, nor exposed brains, nor blood, only “a blue spot (you could hardly call it a hole, the flesh had closed so much over it) in the left temple” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 208). This is hardly a hole, hardly a wound, hardly a realistic representation of a mortal head wound from a gun. It might not be reasonable to expect Gaskell to have seen or known very much about mortal head wounds of this sort; even so, the hole is singularly bloodless for any wound. 85 The narrative invites the reader to look upon the corpse’s perfection: “You saw, too, the chiseled beauty of the features much more perfectly than when the brilliant colouring of life had distracted your attention” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 210). Perfected by death, this corpse is more beautiful to behold not because death erased life’s suffering but because death purges its liveliness manifested in the rosy suffusion of racing blood. Even as the body stiffens and grows cold (the hand Mrs. Carson holds is “rapidly stiffening, even in her warm grasp,” and she warns her family that “‘he feels rather chilly’”), Mrs. Carson caresses and kisses the dead body of her son, finding the corpse still so very much like her son that she can, in her grief, insist that the body lives, quite contrary to Mary Barton’s shuddering reaction to her mother’s strangely like and unlike face (Gaskell, Mary Barton 211). This wounded yet perfected corpse even wears good death’s smile. The corpse’s beauty facilitates Mrs. Carson’s willful blindness to an unexpected and heartbreaking death. As proof of the corpse’s vitality, Mrs. Carson exclaims “‘Look! He is smiling now,’” and the narrative substantiates this claim, noting that “in truth, the lips, in the rest of death, did look as though they wore a smile” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 211). These lips, however, do not really smile but “look as though” they smile and move in “the waving light of the unsnuffed candle” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 211; emphasis added). That the smile is there for those who seek it implies that reading the good death means reading the corpse in a certain light. Like many other good death corpses, such as the “profound repose” of Nell’s body, Harry appears “so very calm and full of repose” that “it looked more like sleep than death” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 210). Notably, “it” can refer either to the corpse itself or the peaceful representation of death. The dead body is 86 the corpse—a natural dead body beset by decomposition—and a representation of the “the dead” perfected by death. Mirroring the ambiguity of Harry’s status as a natural and a beautiful corpse, a decomposing body and the perfected dead, characters’ and the narrative’s references to him confound categorization of the body, referring to it as both corpse and person, present and absent, “the son” and “the dead.” Harry is first a passive object “‘brought home’” rather than a person who has come home (Gaskell, Mary Barton 204; emphasis added). The policeman who discovers the body speaks of it as a thing lying in the road, obstructing the pathway, but once they discover the body’s identity, it becomes a “he” and a “him,” thereby splitting representation of the body between that of an inert thing and a person. In a second instance, the corpse is again bifurcated between a state as a person and non-person. The nurse tells Mr. Carson that “‘Master Henry has not come back,’” truthfully speaking, for Harry Carson the person has not come back, nor will he ever return home because only the dead body remains. Directly after, Sophy Carson counters, “‘O papa, Harry is come back,’” implying that the dead body is Harry. Understandably, Carson bursts out “‘One of you says he is not come home, and the other says he is. Now, that’s nonsense!’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 206). Indeed, the dead body is “nonsense,” being the remains of a person and a shell that is not the person. Harry is not at home and is at home. Death renders him neither here nor there, a passive object and a body that is and is not Harry. The narrative recategorizes the corpse yet again, describing a body stripped of what it was (a person) by what it has become (an emblematic presence). No longer Harry Carson, the body is “the dead.” Again confusing any certainty of reading the corpse in a certain light, the narrative refers to the “dead body” and “the 87 remains,” then to “the dead son,” marking the body as someone’s son, though not his son or Carson’s son, which distances the relationship, after which the body becomes a “him” carried upstairs and laid out upon Harry’s bed. At the same time, the narrative makes at least seven explicit references to some part of the body, using the definite article, in itself a radical departure from the vast majority of depictions of a good death corpse. Harry’s death is bad, being sudden and violent, but also good because his corpse bears the marks of the good death, and a sudden and painless death is certainly good (the quicker the death the less suffering the body must withstand) in comparison to the agonizing deaths of Mrs. Barton, Ben Davenport, and the Wilson twins. Harry Carson, the young man who demonstrated a distinct deficiency in empathy with the starving workers’ plight and behaved badly to Jem Wilson with little reason but his own sense of classism and ego, sought to seduce Mary Barton and then harassed her after she declared her desire to end the flirtation, does not deserve a good death. Rather than epitomizing his life through a fitting death scene and dead body, the narrative subjects Harry to a death worthy of his life while granting his family a corpse worthy of their love. The corpse must yet be loved in order for Mr. Carson’s grief and his relentless endeavor to punish the murderer both to seem justifiable and to warrant the reader’s sympathy. His body, then, cannot be a hideous one away from which the family and the reader turn their faces. Nobody desires justice for Quilp’s hated and torn body, but it might be reasonable to demand justice for Harry Carson’s loved and beautiful body. Among the dying in Mary Barton, John Barton alone can endeavor to adhere to the model good death’s principles; unlike the agonizing and incapacitating illnesses of other characters, neither mental incapacitation, nor pain, nor delirium threaten Barton’s 88 ability to think, speak, and act. Nevertheless, mental anguish mars his death scene, which does not culminate in a good death corpse. Following good death precepts, Barton seeks to engage in the struggle to make himself worthy of beatitude, noting to Carson that in his last hours, “‘I must pass wrestling with my soul for a character to take into the other world’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 459). After beginning life “‘hankering after the right way,’” but finding that neither masters nor workers conducted themselves in accordance with the Bible’s precepts, “‘I gave it up in despair, trying to make folks’ actions square wi’ th’ Bible . . . [and] from that time I’ve dropped down, down—down’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 467). Like a good Christian on his deathbed, he greatly repents of his fall, uttering in despair, “‘God above only can tell the agony with which I’ve repented me of it,’” and accepts, even welcomes, the consequences of his bad actions, informing Carson, “‘As for being hanged, sir, I know it’s all right and proper’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 458). Further following principles of the good death, Barton seeks forgiveness for his great sin, murdering Carson’s son, begging, “‘Forgive me the trespass I have done!’” but Carson coldly replies, “‘Let my trespasses be unforgiven, so that I may have vengeance for my son’s murder’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 462). The narrative denies Barton a significant element of the expected good death narrative formula—being forgiven just as he forgives others—since Mr. Carson refuses to play the part of compliant witness by forgiving Barton. Barton himself deviates from the good death in granting no blessings, since “‘Blessing from such as me would not bring thee any good,’” and neither can he, having “forfeited all right to bind up his brother’s wounds,” offer consolation to Carson, who weeps over the loss of his son (Gaskell, Mary Barton 459, 461). His unforgiven crime precludes his ability to grant last blessings to his witnesses. In vain, it seems, Barton 89 struggles towards moral self-cleansing. Responsibility and punishment he has, forgiveness, he does not have. This failed scene affects not only Barton’s behavior but also that of the witnesses, who rather than watching for the last breath and the good death’s smile or listening for last blessings and prayers, “listened with divided attention to his faint breathings; for in each hasty hurried step that echoes in the street outside, they thought they heard the approach of the office of justice,” sent by the vengeful Carson (Gaskell, Mary Barton 465). However, as with Davenport’s last-minute guarantee of the good death, Barton too seems to receive a last-minute reprieve when Carson relents and prays at Mary’s request, “‘God be merciful to us sinners.—Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us!’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 468). Barton, who had “folded his hands as if in prayer,” receives the words of forgiveness he had so longed to hear and, soothed at last, dies in Carson’s arms. For the witnesses and the readers, Barton’s final moment of death is satisfying and shocking, for he does not merely die in Carson’s arms, he becomes “a corpse.” Barton certainly struggled, painfully and not entirely successfully, to live and die according to Christian precepts, and still he was, after all, a murderer, albeit a loved one. There is no model good death available to the characters of Mary Barton, not those who live well, nor for those who die well, according to Christian notions of a good life and good death. The death scenes illustrate the physical toll that dying takes on the body and the emotional pain experienced by those watching the death or viewing the corpse, while implying the profound difficulty any dying person must face when attempting to die well. In a novel in which the dying body’s plight is full of indignities, fever, and agony, the good death is either a quick and painless one, like Harry Carson’s, 90 or one lacking pain and awareness, like Alice’s. Placid death in an industrial town requires that the dying person feels no pain, that the body not engage in a bitter struggle against the disease, and that the mind not engage in a struggle against past regrets, pains, and present fear of death. The firmly demarcated boundaries of the good death and bad death are inapplicable in a genre that endeavors to approach living and dying conditions of the laborers with some degree of realism—that is, without abstraction or allegory that tend to efface working and dying bodies. Such an endeavor requires writers to eschew bifurcating conceptual frameworks that efface the individual death with a formulaic narrative that recounts a journey through the stages of Christian eschatology. Clearly, the corpse is no mere senseless mass of matter, interchangeable with any other senseless mass of matter. Neither is death the end of a character’s story. The witnesses gaze upon, touch, and speak about the corpse to themselves and one another and so participate in the creation of the postmortem narrative. Survivors bear witness to, measure, and circulate evidence of a successful good death, and their reactions in part determine whether the corpse is indeed a thing of beauty or a thing of horror. Furthermore, the corpse sometimes has a narrative of its own. In conventional death scenes adhering to the good death narrative, friends and family retain the corpses for days and continue to express their love for the dead person and admiration for the dead body in its postmortem perfection. Fiction elides death’s horrible change, which enables the characters to love and be soothed by the dead body. Otherwise, in their discomfort and horror the survivors would shun the body, as Mary Barton does her mother’s strangely like and unlike corpse, or disavow the body, as Boucher’s child does when he asks Margaret Hale, “‘Is yon thing upstairs really him? It doesna look like him’” (Gaskell, 91 North and South 274). Novels’ depictions of the perfected corpse often present a fallacious ideal of death and the dead body. Victorian culture, on the other hand, exhibited a fascination with the real corpse’s strangeness, dissolution, and horror. Cultural discourses about the dead body shunned the perfected corpse, instead centering on the putrid (and dangerous) body, particularly that embraced by the living. 92 Chapter One Endnotes i Sometimes narratives apply definite articles in some descriptions of a living person’s parts. Many of these usages function as a means to alter syntax, staving off syntactical monotony; for instance, Mrs. Hale “pressed the hand that lay below hers on the coverlet” rather than pressing “his hand” (Gaskell, North and South 221). Frequently, this variation is followed by a prepositional phrase, serving to more clearly indicate to whom the body part belongs, such as “the face of the hostess” or “the face of the man” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 62; 75). More frequently, narratives use possessive pronouns when describing a character—“her face was swollen”—and when referring to the actions a person is taking— “Mary Barton would toss her head” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 9; 42). Definite articles applied to generalizations form a second grouping, demonstrated when the narrator of Mary Barton describes a type of factory girl: “the usual out-of-doors dress of that particular class of maids; namely, a shawl, which . . . was brought over the head and hung loosely down, or was pinned under the chin” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 15). Because there is no particular she, “the chin” rather than “her chin” is appropriate. A third usage appears when the narrative’s central character is very ill or faint, thus being ill-able to perceive clearly, such as when Mary Barton, close to unconsciousness, perceives that “the figure, so bowed down, with the face concealed with both hands, was really Jem” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 408). It sometimes happens that when a character compares one face to another, the points of comparison are preceded by the definite article, evident in the passage where Walter Hartright compares his beloved with her half-sister: “I now saw Miss Fairlie’s likeness in Anne Catherick . . . . In the general outline of the countenance and general proportion of the features, in the colour of the hair . . . the lips . . . the head” (Collins, The Woman in White 100). Idiom forms perhaps the largest category with phrases such as “a shake of the head” and “a shake of the hand.” In general, narratives use the definite article when referring to a person who is not fully known or perceived or when the description refers to a generalization rather than a specific person. ii The Pickwick Papers (1836-37), Oliver Twist (1837-39), Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), Barnaby Rudge (1841), Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Dombey and Son (1846-48), David Copperfield (1849-1850), Bleak House (1852-1853), Hard Times (1854), Little Dorrit (1855-57), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Great Expectations (1860-61), and Our Mutual Friend (1864-65). I do not include the Christmas Books or the unfinished Edwin Drood (1869-70), which does not describe any corpses. iii Here I consider only those corpses whose deaths the reader witnesses, whose deaths are related by characters who witnessed them (which includes death scenes in imbedded stories of The Pickwick Papers), or those corpses characters find within a day of the death. I exclude tersely narrated deaths—those that lack what can be called a death scene—such as Lord George Gordon who “died in his cell” and Gashford who “died in his bed” in Barnaby Rudge—or implied deaths, Dora Cooperfield’s for instance. Obviously, in order to concentrate upon more fully narrated deaths, this categorization framework leaves out many deaths referenced during narratives. Vanished corpses include any bodies that vanish from the text at the death moment, such as Barkis’s. Of those counted among the vanished corpses, the dead bodies of William Dorrit, little Paul Dombey, and Mr. Chester do make brief appearances in later scenes, but the narratives do not refer to their corpses during the death scene. After William Dorrit’s death, the narrative describes the scene of Frederick Dorrit’s death after the death has already occurred, during which the narrator refers to William’s corpse (by which Frederick has died) as one of “two figures” and “the hand.” In categorizing corpses to which the narrative refers by body or body part (or otherwise referring to a “corpse” rather than an “it” or a “weight”), I did not count an instance where the only reference is to blood (which occurs in Tigg Montague’s case) since blood, although inside the body, is not a body part, and blood stains are also used to displace the corpse (such as in Tulkinghorn’s case). Finally, I did not count group deaths. In some cases, these are uncountable. The narrator offers no numbers for the deaths and bodies in the riot scene of Barnaby Rudge. However, the narrator of A Tale of Two Cities describes the seven executed bodies as a corporate body—“seven dead faces” and “seven gory heads on pikes”—but for consistency’s sake, I counted neither the corporate body nor seven corpses (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 219). iv These deflecting or displacing terms include pronouns (it, he, and she, which replace explicit terms such as “dead body,” “corpse,” and “carcass”); name (which denies the dead body by referring to the person by 93 name as if he or she is still living); social position (referring to the place the dead person had held in reference to other living people—such as father, mother, his/her child); or euphemism (weight, burden, something). v Any portrayal of death requires a rhetoric of death, or a collection of stylistic devices that allow the author to maneuver around the difficulty of depicting what is non-mimetic. In Dickens’s works, this “pure style” consists of transposition (writing death through the medium of “idioms and metaphors drawn from life”), epitome (wherein the type of death or a character’s manner of dying encapsulates that character’s identity or essence through such means as a signature idiom), and displacement (whereby a protagonist or character may experience figurative death and rebirth through the death of a proxy). vi The Gaffer too dies a fitting death, being drowned and tangled in his own ropes after having been too eager to rob a corpse, his own corpse subjected to the cruelties of water and wind. Esther’s excoriating aunt Miss Barbary while dying remains silent, cold, unloving, and frowning, and “even afterwards, her frown remained unsoftened” (Dickens, Bleak House 33). This woman’s approach to death determines her corpse’s state after death, the dead body mirroring the live body’s physical habitual mode of expression. vii Earlier novels tend to convey the death moment by using quite explicit phrases: the pantomime actor in The Pickwick Papers “fell back—dead!” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 66); the brutal father in the same novel “ruptured a blood-vessel, and he was a dead man before his son could raise him” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 86). Agnes Fleming “fell back—and died” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 11); Old Sally “muttered some indistinct sounds in her throat and fell lifeless on the bed” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 252); Sir John Chester fell back dead” (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge 680); Smike “whispered that it was Eden—and so died”; and Arthur Havishman “lifted himself up hard, and was dead” (Dickens, Great Expectations 375). Obviously, such a brief, even curt, mode of conveying the death moment is not reserved for the bad death or for bad characters, for certainly Smike dies a good death while Agnes Fleming, though a sinner, is no villain. Later novels tend to filter the death scene through metaphor and epitomizing idioms that displace the death moment and signal the corpse’s erasure. When Fanny Dombey dies after childbirth, having failed to “make an effort,” the narrator conveys the death using an elegant metaphor: “clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world” (Dickens, Dombey and Son 60). The water metaphor that displaces the death also displaces any reference to the dead body. Other references lack any mention of the body, dying or dead. John Willet tells his son that “‘I’m a- going, Joseph . . . to the Salvanners’—and immediately gave up the ghost” (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge 687). Little Johnny of Our Mutual Friend ““Having now bequeathed all he had to dispose of, and arranged his affairs in this world, Johnny, thus speaking, left it.” Little Paul Dombey’s death is signaled by the narrative’s repetition of “The old, old fashion” (Dickens, Dombey and Son 297). Mrs. Skewton becomes a “something else upon its flight besides the wind and clouds.” As if the death were a performance in a theater, the narrative confirms the death, and the narrator closes the scene with “Draw the rose-coloured curtains close!” (Dickens, Dombey and Son 674). Mrs. Clennam “lived and died a statue” (Dickens, Little Dorrit 822). In other cases, an ironic euphemism on the part of the narrator signals the individual’s death. Anthony Chuzzlewit dies in his easy-chair, the actual moment of death unremarked upon, although the narrative both signals the death by remarking “not all the air that is, nor all the winds that ever blew ‘twixt Heaven and Earth, could have brought new life to him” (Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit 438). The anti- epitome confirms the death though the narrator’s wry statement, “Plunge him to the throat in golden pieces now, and his heavy fingers shall not close on one!” (Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit 438). The text replaces the corpse with in imaginary “him” plunged in gold, thus displacing the real body in its easy-chair. Mrs. Gradgrind dies engaged an activity that epitomizes her living state (which the narrator early establishes are “surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily”), writing nothing with a nonexistent pen on her bedclothes in a feeble attempt to communicate to her daughter (Dickens, Hard Times 25). The narrator displaces the death moment with an epitomizing metaphor—“the light that had always been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out”—and the death moment with an ironic religious reference—“even Mrs. Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages, and patriarchs” (Dickens, Hard Time 255). 94 viii The narrative of Our Mutual Friend does not represent the death moment in reference to the body, as with Sikes’s violently jerked body, but neither does it displace the death moment with a euphemism. Instead, the text signals the death by a secondhand revelation of his body’s death, discovered and uttered by a medical professional who declares, “‘You had better send for something to cover it. All’s over’” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 712). The narrative’s portrayal of Mr. Dolls’s death displaces neither the death moment nor the corpse. The same paragraph refers to the corpse six times (in three sentences) as “it” and once as Mr. Dolls (when he lay among his daughter’s dolls, with an equally blank look in his dead eyes). Admittedly, the narrative does displace most reference to the corpse with a pronoun, but the reference to Mr. Dolls’s blank eyes (“there, in the midst of the dolls with no speculation in their eyes, lay Mr. Dolls with no speculation in his”) conveys a brief image of the actual corpse (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 712). Representations of other violent deaths—Tigg Montague, Carker, Nancy, Rogue Riderhood and Bradley Headstone, Jonas Chuzzlewit, Ralph Nickleby, even Steerforth and Ham—sometimes elide the death moment. But none use metaphor to displace or cover over the death, and all make some brief reference to the body. Nonviolent deaths in which there is no death moment but there is a corpse reference include that of the little scholar, Honoria Dedlock, Mrs. Joe, Jenny’s infant in Bleak House, and the queer client’s wife in The Pickwick Papers. These deaths all lack displacing metaphors. Even though the infant’s death moment is euphemized in Esther’s noticing “I saw what had happened,” Esther also notes plainly that “The child died” (Dickens, Bleak House 155). Hence, even if the narrative elides the death moment, so long as there is neither total elision nor displacement (which often go hand in hand), the death representation is very likely to include the corpse. ix Only Nell’s “bruised and swollen feet” signal her progressively weakening and fragile state that lead to her illness and death (and death perfects her corpse rather than marring it) (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 451). Dying as she travels, Betty Higden admits of no pain, not even to herself, but instead experiences a fading of physical and mental powers. Her last morning, she is “fast declining as to the clearness of her thoughts, though not as to the steadiness of her purpose,” and as the day progresses, she finds “that her strength was quitting her,” and “the wants of this little life were passing away from her. . . . She could not have swallowed food . . . . The day was cold and wet, but she scarcely knew it” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 498). Even Magwitch, dying of injuries sustained in a steamer accident, never complains of pain. When Pip inquires “‘Are you in much pain to-day?’” Magwitch responds, “‘I don’t complain of none, dear boy’” (Dickens, Great Expectations 480). John Willet “was one morning found speechless in his bed. He lay in this state, free from all tokens of uneasiness” (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge 687). If the good do indeed feel pain while dying, they neither complain of it nor express it in any other way but, like Magwitch, wait placidly to die. An instance recorded by Henry Mayhew in the fourth volume of London Labour and the London Poor provides a striking contrast. Paraphrasing a hospital surgeon’s description of a young French girl’s death (apparently brought to London under false pretences and forced to work as a prostitute), Mayhew writes: She exclaimed . . . May I not recover; I suffer no pain. But her looks belied her words; her features were frightfully haggard and worn; her eyes, dry and bloodshot, had almost disappeared in their sockets, and her general appearance denoted the approach of him she had been so constantly invoking. Unwrapping some bandages, I proceeded to examine her, when an extraordinary change came over her, and I knew that her dissolution was not far distant. Her mind wandered, and . . . An expression of intense suffering contracted her emaciated features. . . her soul glided impalpably away, and she was a corpse. (Mayhew 215) The soul reference does euphemize the death moment even as the brief “she was a corpse” transforms living body into corpse, yet the dying body is most strikingly portrayed. x The novel provides a series of references to the cart metaphor in order to trace Jo’s progressive bodily dissolution: “that cart of his is heavier to draw, and draws with a hollower sound” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 884); “the cart seems to be breaking down” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 885); “the cart so hard to draw, is near its journey’s end, and drags over stony ground. All round the clock, it labours up the broken 95 steeps, shattered and worn. Not many times can the sun rise, and behold it still upon its weary road” (Dickens, Bleak House 889); and finally, “Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very near its end” (Dickens, Bleak House 891). Of course, the cart is an apt metaphor, standing in for Jo as vagrant and vagrants in general whose wanderings, starvation, and being forced to “move along” does indeed drag them along rugged roads and eventually shakes them all to pieces (according to Dickens; Henry Mayhew has a far different view of vagrants). xi Whereas Dickens’s descriptions of the dead or dying children may include some brief references to the wasting effects of illness, these references do not admit of the profound pain and emaciation that such bodies undergo. The dying little scholar’s arms are “wasted” and “feeble,” his hand “languid” and “passive” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 198). Nell’s arm too is “languid,” but she is not emaciated. In contrast, Helen of Tonna’s Helen Fleetwood admits of pain and expresses hope (not confidence) for release for an agonizing death, determining not to “‘embitter my short span with medicine, and blisterings, and such things. I suffer little pain now; and I hope I may sink gently . . . as many others do’” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 288). Nevertheless, “short but severe were her sufferings,” after which she leaves only “wasted remains” (Tonna, Helen Fleetwood 319). This dying mother Mary Brotherton discovers in the factory slum has an “emaciated body,” and “It required no very long examination of the poor patient to discover that her last moment was rapidly approaching” (Trollope 135). In Trollope’s and Tonna’s novels, the dying feel pain, and disease emaciates their bodies even before death. xii In cases of profoundly painful illnesses, such as Mr. Doll’s delirium tremens, or more gentle illnesses, such as that of the queer client’s wife, the narrative does not elaborate on what the sudden change preceding death looks like, though the reader can catch a glimpse of its horror through the reactions of the dying person’s loved ones who themselves feel ill at seeing it (the moonlight “showed him [the queer client] a change upon her features, which made him stagger’”) (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 405). Whereas in the industrial novel Mary Barton Davenport’s features are “prominent, boney, and rigid,” and in North and South Mrs. Hale’s face “gray and sunken,” this woman’s face has merely shown “a change,” which spares the reader a chilling image of what death’s stamp looks like. xiii Ernest Jones’s Woman’s Wrongs (1852) depicts such an instance of deception. It should be noted, however, that his collection of vignettes explores the wrongs of the aristocratic woman as well as the laboring woman. It is, therefore, not entirely an “industrial novel.” Furthermore, for the most part, deaths in industrial novels indicate the consequence of bad living conditions or punish a deserving industrialist with a fitting death, besides the conventional purposes of shifting the plot’s course or promoting character growth. The incident of the glazier, however, is a device to heighten character and reader tension, a use of death that I have found in no other industrial novel. A desperate man and a few coworkers rob their place of employment. When the employer returns unexpectedly, the group attempts to escape by burrowing under through a wall, which collapses upon them, half burying a glazier. Thinking the merely unconscious glazier has been killed, his cohorts sink a knife into his body, intending to dismember it so that they may escape through the gap he blocks, causing him to gain consciousness. Initially, “his limbs became motionless,” but in the next paragraph, his legs become “The legs of the body” and his body becomes “the body” (Jones 19). In the narrative’s description, then, the glazier no longer is his body; instead, it is a body that belongs to him, “the body of the glazier,” as if it were an accessory rather than the man. When spoken of by other characters, this supposed corpse is still “‘him,’” even as his companions talk of “‘[getting] him out in pieces!’” (Jones 20). Unconscious, the glazier is a corpse, but only the narrative refers to him in such a manner. xiv A second example of depicting a false corpse occurs earlier in Our Mutual Friend with the death and resurrection of Rogue Riderhood, who for most of the episode is already assumed by the characters and the narrative to be a corpse. Tootles tells Miss Abbey that “‘He’s been under water a long time, Miss; but they’ve grappled up the body’” to which Miss Abbey replies, “‘Let ‘em bring it here’” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 431). Rogue is “the dead man” (even attracting a crowd, as corpses in public tend to do), “the body” three times, “the burden,” “recumbent figure,” “the dank carcase,” “the outer husk and shell of 96 Riderhood,” and “This flabby lump of mortality” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 431; 432; 433). The narrator even goes so far as to note incipient rigor mortis, remarking that “Supple to twist and turn as the Rogue has ever been, he is sufficiently rigid now,” which occurs only after systemic necrosis (432). Despite the language, which is indeed designed to cause the reader to form the notion that this really is a dead body, a doctor manages to revive Rogue by means of “artificial respiration,” to which the body initially refuses to respond. This body, already a corpse, already seized by rigor mortis, comes back to life, not a corpse at all, no “dank carcase” or “lump of mortality.” xv Eleven deaths occur during the narrative’s timeline (Mary Barton senior, her infant, Ben Davenport, the Wilson twins, Mr. Ogden, George Wilson, Harry Carson, Alice, John Barton, and Esther). Two, George Wilson’s and Mr. Ogden’s, occur off-stage. Six deaths are related secondhand, having occurred before the narrative begins: Alice’s mother, her brother Tom and his wife, John Barton’s son Tom, Job Leigh’s daughter and son-in-law. xvi Sometimes, as Gaskell points out in North and South, purchasing power cannot ease the physical discomfort of disease. Mrs. Hale, “gentle and quiet in intense bodily suffering,” but the nature of Mrs. Hale’s disease, never fully disclosed to the reader, renders it beyond medical healing. Doctor Donaldson can “‘can only delay its progress—alleviate the pain it causes’” by using opiates that sometimes cause her to appear confused (she rambles at times, and her eyes are “filmy [and] wandering”) when she is not half- conscious or unconscious under the drug’s effects (Gaskell, North and South 154; 221). Despite the opiates, Mrs. Hale is often “weak, dizzy, and tired” and suffers “paroxysms . . . each more severe than the last” (Gaskell, North and South 222; 223). In the end, the opiates do very little to quell the agony her disease causes her. On her last night, “Convulsions came on; and when they ceased, Mrs. Hale was unconscious. Her husband might lie by her shaking the bed with his sobs; her son’s strong arms might lift her tenderly up into a comfortable position; her daughter’s hands might bathe her face; but she knew them not” (Gaskell, North and South 229). This grim scene of illness and death allows for no tender moments immediately before death. Mrs. Hale cannot tell her family how she loves them, nor die with her arms twined around her husband, nor speak of heavenly visions, nor die calmly and tranquilly, leaving a corpse devoid of the marks of illness, care, and suffering. Agony, lack of lucidity, and unconsciousness preclude deathbed speeches and moral exhortation. Opiates do very little to make her death easeful to herself or her loved ones who must witness her agony. 97 Chapter Two The Most Wretched Corpse: Underclass Bodies and Sanitarian Policing Reporting on the postmortem examination of a five-day-old body in 1841, London surgeon Henry Ancell notes that the body displayed “the usual rigidity of limbs,” and while “the blood had gravitated in a remarkable degree to the dependent parts, giving the posterior surface a florid red colour,” other parts of the body “were livid, [the] face pallid, [and] eye turbid from decomposition” (Notes 39). Stiff, florid, livid, and pallid, and this is a corpse kept in a cold room during the chilly season, when low temperatures significantly retard putrefaction. Corpses without such marks of death upon them, even several days after the last rattling breath, are to be found only in the parlors and bedrooms of fictional narratives. Days after death, real corpses without the unnatural aid of embalming are at best stiff and discolored—at worst, the skin peeling back, organs liquefying and escaping out of thinned and splitting flesh, and the whole swarming with maggots. Have you ever slept in the same bed with a putrid dead body? I daresay neither you nor most of us have. The dead body is disgusting and horrifying, no longer human but something to hand over to the funeral director who seeks to conceal the fact that the body is indeed a dead one (even as the grotesqueries of a made-up corpse seem to render it alarmingly unnatural and unlike the loved one) and something to conceal in a cemetery that masks its function as a resting place for the dead by resembling nothing so much as a park. A series of displacements conceal the death and dissolution of the human body: preserved and made-up flesh in the place of putrid flesh, graves instead of bodies, and 98 parks rather than graves. The corpse must not be touched and certainly neither lived with nor slept with. In the early nineteenth century, however, the corpse was still human, still embraced by the family and the community. In the 1830s and 1840s the public domain began to adopt the medical man’s view of the corpse as an inhuman thing. Medical men and social reformers investigated, proclaimed, and legislated the necessity of separating the corpse from its survivors even as businesses learned to profit from the dead body and the public’s growing fear of it. This chapter offers a social history of the corpse, but it offers more than a story of the dead body’s meaning and designated place in thought and practice. Through the corpse’s story emerges a narrative of social control, a narrative enacted on the bodies of the poor whom public policy makers increasingly described as beastlike threats to public order and morality and whose behaviors—from their amusements to their market days, their manners and manner of protesting, and even their treatment of the dead—must therefore be policed. Various discourses worked together and in opposition to shape the public’s perception and treatment of the dead body by defining and explaining the corpse’s substance, meaning, and place in a social context. In defining the corpse’s proper narrative, these discourses also defined the improper narrative that rendered the dead body a threat to public health and social order. In addition, reformers of public practice proposed solutions to control or eradicate the disorder propagated by the bad corpse. The burgeoning funeral industry purported to protect the corpse from desecration and protect the living from contact with the dead through various forms of concealing the dead body from the public view and public access. Medical men provided the scientific arguments justifying the social reformers’ campaign to separate the dead body and the survivors. 99 Claiming that shortly after death the body slides into horrible otherness that irrevocably dissociates it from the living person and the category of the human, medical men made the once-human dead body into something not human. Using medical discourse, witness observation, and opinion to substantiate their claims, sanitarians further dislodged the corpse from its place in the community by declaring the dead body a source of contagion and moral decay. In the age of sanitary reform, mixing the living and the dead was a violation of order, for death infected life and morality. Therefore, the most dangerous and demoralizing body was the dead body among the living and the disinterred corpse exposed to public view. While medical men argued that all bodies were no-longer-human contagion carriers, the social reformers declared the dead bodies of the poor and working classes particularly dangerous conveyors of physical and moral disease. Class, then, was a key element in determining the corpse’s narrative as one of exposure and indecency, desecration, contagion, and moral disorder or one of proper concealment and distancing. Despite social reformers’ urgent warnings and actual policing, the poorer classes—who apparently did not view their dead as unsanitary, disease-engendering horrors—preferred to maintain a close proximity with their dead before burial, in essence establishing a community of the living and the dead. According to parliamentary reports on the working classes’ pre-burial treatment of their dead loved ones, they incorporated the dead into their lives to an intimate and surprising extent that is unmatched even in fictional representations of survivors’ reactions to the death of a loved one. These families lived with their loved ones’ dead bodies. The survivors proved their sensibility and humanity by preparing these bodies for the grave and by showing affection for those bodies—kissing, caressing and, yes, sleeping with them. By the late 1830s, this mode of 100 loving and caring for the dead was a dissenting practice and the dissenters primarily members of the poorer classes. It is true that problems procuring money for the funeral and bad housing required the poor to live with and occasionally sleep next to their dead sometimes for weeks, and this may have contributed to the poor’s continuation of older folk traditions dealing with pre-burial treatment of the dead. Still, sanitarians report several instances where the poor would not give up their dead to those offering to remove the putrid corpses from rented rooms but insisted on caring for the corpses themselves. Circumstances obliged the poor to care for their dead, but housing and financial conditions did not require the survivors to caress and kiss the corpses; but they did. Initially, novels too dissented from the social reformers’ conceptions of the dead body and its proper treatment. For some, the best dead body is the same corpse against which sanitarians and medical men expressed alarm—the poor corpse embraced by its family and community. Eventually, the social reformers’ campaign to dehumanize the dead body infected novels’ representation of corpses, for as the decades progressed into the middle of the century, corpses in novels no longer are the bodies that survivors find comforting. The dead body becomes a discomforting thing to be eschewed. Beginning in the 1840s, the worrisome dead body emerges as the neglected and maltreated corpse; through the 1850s and 1860s, the loved corpse too becomes the horrible corpse. Nevertheless, contrasting sanitarian and medical opinion on the underclass corpse’s horror, mid-century novels expressed the greatest concern about the solitary body and the middle-class body rather than the poor one. Early in the century, the undertaker began to address public concerns over the body’s proper pre-burial treatment in terms not merely of social scale but of decency and 101 respectability. Many historians and scholars who write of the funeral industry’s development in the nineteenth century tend to focus upon the role of class: the funeral as a means of expressing one’s social place (or increasingly the desire to appear to belong to a certain class), particularly through the appropriation of the heraldic funeral’s ceremonies and trappings detached from their former significance (often unknown to the undertakers themselves) and translated into extravagant parades, coaches, feathers, and mutes. Accordingly, much of the investigation of the funeral industry’s history concentrates upon the funeral and mourning arrangements. Equally important, if less studied, is the corpse’s role in the industry’s development. The funeral industry had been gathering power since the aristocracy’s rebellion against the high expense of heraldic funerals under the control of the College of Arms in the late seventeenth century, but as historians Ruth Richardson and Glennys Howarth note, the early nineteenth-century fear of bodysnatching generated considerable growth in the magnitude and nature of the undertaker’s role in corpse care as they offered new services (iron coffins, iron straps, mortsafes, double or triple coffins) in the endeavor to keep the corpse from becoming a thing with a use-value, traded for guineas on the corpse market. The number of undertakers increased along with the growth in services and the public’s use of those services. Evidently, undertaking was so lucrative a business by 1843, eleven years after the 1832 Anatomy Act essentially ended disinterment for anatomical purposes, in London alone there were 275 people working as full-time undertakers and 730 people involved in the funeral trade (being part-time undertakers, coffin makers, and funeral furnishers) for what reformer and sanitarian Edwin Chadwick speculated were 114 deaths a day (Chadwick, Report). There were “between six and seven undertakers waiting for the 102 chance of every private funeral,” and yet such a market glut did not lower the prices since there was a proliferation of middle men between funeral furniture manufacturers and the numerous undertakers who sold them to clients. Many services were deemed indispensable to the respectable funeral (so much so that undertakers Chadwick interviewed declare that the price of funerals could be cut fifty percent without diminishing respectability, merely by cutting down on the profusion of services per funeral!) (Chadwick, Report 53). The public’s willingness to pay exorbitant amounts in order to keep their loved ones’ dead bodies out of circulation in the body-snatchers’ market was not the only reason for the explosion in the funeral business (increasing amounts of disposable income that could be put to class-affirming uses being another), but it was a significant one. In response to illegitimate business (body-snatching), legitimate businesses (undertaking) learned to increase its profit from corpses—rich bodies, middle-class bodies, and working-class bodies—in new ways, offering new services (which eventually came to be seen as indispensable) that substantially increased the cost of funerals and burials for all bodies except those of the paupers who buried as cheaply as possible (in flimsy pine coffins and in mass unmarked graves) at parish expense. Historians have addressed changes in mourning and the growth in the funeral industry’s scope in the wake of body-snatching fears, but much less attention has been paid to the shift in pre-burial customs directly affecting the body’s treatment. The funeral industry’s appropriation of social customs relating to pre-burial treatment of the corpse is an important albeit less-scrutinized aspect of the undertaker’s history. With the work of modern historians on the shifts in the funeral industry’s services as well as the evidence 103 of nineteenth-century social reformers on working-class and middle-class practices in corpse care, it is possible to theorize a history of the corpse’s postmortem treatment during the first half of the nineteenth century. The undertakers gained a foothold in the pre-burial care of the body on the basis of survivors’ fears about threats to the corpse’s integrity, but survivors did not relinquish their services even after such fears no longer had a basis after the 1832 Anatomy Act. In fact, the funeral industry continued to expand its services throughout the nineteenth century, progressively taking over the body’s pre- burial care from the family. There was a new fear, generated and perpetuated by social reformers, that replaced the old body-snatching fear. Soon after the Anatomy Act, social reformers began to frame the dead body as a disease-engendering horror, which further fueled the funeral industry’s expansion. This was not a fear for the body but fear of the body. Initially, survivors worried about the corpse’s decent treatment and sought to secure the body’s safety, but by the 1830s, survivors were also concerned about securing their own safety from the corpse’s contaminating influence. This second fear further increased the public’s reliance upon the undertaker’s business, particularly in relation to the interval between death and burial. So horrible did the corpse become that the survivors would sometimes refuse to remain in the same house as their loved one’s corpse. According to one undertaker, “instances sometimes occur of persons of respectable condition in life who cannot bear the painful impressions produced by the long continued presence of the corpse in the house, and who quit it, and return to attend the funeral” (Chadwick, Report 93). It is likely that the funeral industry was able to make greater inroads into customs of caring for the dead before the funeral as the public came to view the corpse as a dangerous and polluting thing to be shunned rather than 104 embraced. In the later 1830s and the early 1840s, sanitarians, physicians, reformers, and governmental committees studied corpses and published reports, books, and pamphlets that describe the threat the corpse posed to the physical, mental, and moral well-being of those in contact with its corruption. Doubtless, escalating fear and horror of the putrefying corpse caused those with the necessary income to relinquish the handling of the corpse to strangers. It is evident that the survivors’ laying out the dead—no longer an acceptable custom according to predominate middle-class opinion—became disassociated from propriety and respectability. The social reformers’ campaign to make the corpse horrible reframed respectability in corpse management practices. Respectable families did not touch, and certainly neither kissed nor caressed, the dead body. This notion of survivor propriety must have significantly contributed towards associating the use of hired men and women to manage the corpse with respectability. Although it is difficult to determine the actual rapidity with which the public handed over their pre-burial duties to the undertakers, it is clear that by the 1840s undertakers’ men began to take over those duties that the family once took pride in performing: namely, pre-burial ministrations, such as washing the body (Chadwick, Report). In addition, the undertaker’s men were responsible for shaving and coffining the corpse, enshrouding the body, and tapping (to let out gas and fluid byproducts of putrefaction) and watching the coffins since the coffins, once sealed (concealing the corpse and precluding any contact between living and dead bodies), tended to explode under the pressure of putrefactive gasses (Chadwick, Report). It is likely that by mid-century the very wealthy employed trusted servants to attend to the corpse, the wealthy and well-off hired nurses or undertakers’ men to 105 administer the pre-burial duties, and the less well-off artisans and underclasses performed those duties themselves, lacking sufficient funds to possess servants or hire temporary help to buffer them from what historian Leonore Davidoff termed “defiling contact with the sordid, or disordered parts of life” (412). In an environment where the living found the dead body more and more horrible to behold, contemplate, and be near, paying someone to attend to it became a mark of respectability. Wealth allowed the middle and upper classes to avoid dead bodies; unabated social custom and lack of wealth caused the underclasses to continue to lay out and care for their dead. Despite pressure from social reformers who sought to reform the British public’s treatment of their dead, the poor and working classes refused to acquiesce in such a project to alienate the living from their dead. The poorer classes clung tenaciously to their customs of personally handling pre-burial care. The underclasses often could not afford to pay a nurse to lay out the corpse or undertaker’s men to prepare and coffin the body until many days, even weeks, after the death. Even after funds materialized, it appears that the families tended to spend it on the funeral and burial rather than pre-burial care. Even when offered a choice, according to witnesses cited in Chadwick’s 1843 Practice of Interment in Towns, families enforced their ownership of their dead by refusing to relinquish the corpses to the horrified medical officers, relieving officers, and other medical men. Financial circumstances contributed to this tenacity but so too did custom and sentiment. First, for a significant portion of the working and poor population, laying out and viewing the corpse was an integral part of the mourning process. Washing the dead rendered the corpse presentable and dignified, insofar as the manner of death permitted, in addition to acting as a purification ritual. Neglecting to wash the body 106 would present a corpse for viewing still covered with the evidence of severe illness, injury, and death; it “would of course have been considered disrespectful,” Ruth Richardson remarks, “and would reflect badly upon immediate kin, if a corpse was not clean, presentable, and as far as practicable, odourless” (18). Other rituals included closing the eyes of the dead, placing pennies on them if necessary in order to keep them shut, closing the mouth, straightening the limbs (securing them with a tie if needed), and wrapping the corpse in a winding sheet (a sheet wound around the body) or dressing it in a shroud (a garment that tied in the back, not unlike modern hospital gowns) (Janaway; Richardson). Laying out was a continuation of the death-bed care, and like nursing the sick and dying, tending to the dead was primarily a domestic ritual, performed inside the home, often by the women. Handling one’s own dead implied a claim of ownership, enabled the survivors to express their continued affection for the body (by caring for and dressing it), and demonstrated their adherence to the community’s expectations of pre- burial care by which the community judges the survivors. Historian Julie-Marie Strange suggests that the working classes viewed paying someone outside of the circle of family and close community a violation of duty. The pre-burial customs ensured the dignity of the dead, specifically that the body would be treated with respect. In addition, these customs granted the survivors a context in which to maintain a connection with the dead (by handling the body and expressing continued affection for it and the dead person) even as they would begin to distance themselves (by dressing and preparing the body in accordance with rituals that signal the body’s imminent burial and physical disappearance from the lives of the living). Dissenting from sanitarians’ and other social reformers’ 107 increasingly vociferous claims about the repulsive and dangerous body, the working and poor classes refused to participate in the dehumanization of the dead. Medical men produced a discourse establishing the corpse’s fundamental difference from the living body and pointed to that difference as the source of disease and death. This medical dehumanization of the corpse occurred in medical texts decades before the sanitarian crusade, but such scientific claims became important to the reformist argument in the 1830s and 1840s. Medical men thus provided a scientific justification for the growing tendency to avoid contact with a dead body. i A significant proportion of medical men who published their opinions (and to whose work sanitarians turned to substantiate their own claims and reform endeavors) argued that the vital principle stood between wholeness and dissolution, keeping the living body from decay. Death stripped the body of this vital animating principle and in so doing deprived the body of that which maintained its integrity and its human status. Once the animating spark was gone, the body broke apart at the most fundamental level. For one, “‘The solid parts of the human body are easily resolved into a few elements,’” and when such a breakdown occurred, chemical chaos ensued, “‘the various tissues are confounded, their primary principles are disunited, and new bodies are formed’” (Gregory qtd in Walker 131; Mead qtd in Walker 130). Doctor Lyon Playfair supports this view, writing that putrefaction “‘is a change of transformation of the elements of the organism itself’” (qtd. in Chadwick, Report 21). In death, the body’s elements quite literally broke apart and came together again to form new and strange combinations, converting flesh into “‘ammonia, carbonic acid . . . and many fetid vapours’” (Gregory qtd. in Walker 131). Death transformed the human not 108 only into something other than human but also into something absolutely harmful to the living. Far more alarming than the corpse’s inhumanity, medical men warned, was its capacity to disseminate death. The dead body threatened to transform living individuals into inhuman corpses, for death and decay were communicable. As a carrier of contagion, the dead body disseminated them both. Medical professionals offer a plethora of examples to substantiate these claims, which together form a warning narrative about the improper treatment of the dead body. In one mortal episode, physician and medical reformer Thomas Southwood Smith reports, ‘George Higinbottom, an undertaker, was employed to remove in a shell the corpse of a woman who had died of typhus fever in the London Fever Hospital. In conveying the body from the shell into the coffin, he observed that his left hand was besmeared with a moisture which had oozed from it.’ (Smith qtd. in Chadwick, Report 17) This moisture subsequently infected a scratch on Higinbottom’s thumb. He fell ill the following day, and the disease grew in severity until “on the seventh [day] delirium supervened, succeeded by extreme prostration and coma, and death took place on the tenth day’” (Smith qtd. in Chadwick, Report 18). In his 1839 study on the mortal dangers corpses pose to the living, Gatherings from Graveyards, George Alfred Walker also recounts stories about the threat a corpse poses to the health of the living. In one instance, in the summer of “1825, a woman died of typhus fever, in the upper part of the house . . . [and] was buried on the fourth day” (Walker 132). While the body was brought down from the upper floor, a neighbor claims that the staircase’s narrowness necessitated the coffin’s being “placed for a few minutes, in a transverse position, in the door-way of his room . . . [and he] was sensible of a most disgusting odour, which escaped from the 109 coffin” (Walker 132). As a result of this exposure to putrefactive effluvia, the man reports that “he passed through a most severe form of typhus fever; at the expiration of the third week, he was removed to the fever hospital” (Walker 132). In yet another instance, a stout muscular man died in his house in the month of June, after a short illness; on bringing the body downstairs, a disgustingly fetid sanies [liquefied products of decomposition] escaped from the coffin in such considerable quantity, that it flowed down the stairs; Mr. M was instantly affected with giddiness, prostration of strength, and extreme lassitude. (Walker 132) Many of those who reported to Walker and other medical professionals and reformers about their experiences with dead bodies describe having experienced a metallic taste in their mouths when in the presence of a putrid body. Uninvited, the dead body invaded and assaulted all senses, sight, smell, taste, and touch. Compounding the threat, Dr. Playfair argues that the body need not have died from a contagious infection in order to infect the living: ‘Both decaying and putrefying matters are capable of communicating their own state of putrefaction or of decay to any organic matter with which they may come into contact . . . . But this communication of putrefaction is not confined to dead matter.’ (qtd. in Chadwick, Report 21) Mere physical contact between living flesh and a decaying substance can result in putrefaction’s infecting the healthy body. Corpses were no longer the loved ones or even human. They were contaminating things, and the only way to remain unpolluted is to avoid the corpse altogether. Any person in close proximity to a dead body—those attending a viewing or wake and, of course, those who lay out the body—jeopardized his health and life, for decomposition and miasma respected neither wealth nor class. All the more reason to hire somebody to care for the body during this dangerous time period. 110 The arguments making the body inhuman and dangerous provided a basis for the sanitarians’ project of social reform. Sanitarians and reformers of pre-burial and post- burial treatment of the dead, several of them medical men, advanced the discourse about the dead body’s corrupt influence, declaring the body a carrier of contagion and a catalyst for moral decay. They justified their declarations about the corpse’s effect on public health and morals with scientific reasoning founded upon the evidence of medical practitioners and undertakers in addition to morally inflected inferences based upon observation and witness opinion. The less affluent classes, social reformers claimed, were the most immoral, criminal, dirty, and diseased bodies and minds. So too the corpses of the poor and working classes were the most disease-ridden and disease-engendering bodies. Unlike the medical men upon whose work the sanitarians based their claims and who averred that all bodies, regardless of class, posed a dire threat to the well-being of the living, the reformers and their supporters consistently pointed to the bodies of the paupers and working classes as the most menacing corpses. In addition, social reformers declared that the practices of these classes demonstrated the most outrageous ignorance of the health and moral dangers attendant upon close association with dead bodies. Such behavior also indicated that these survivors were woefully ignorant of the proprieties required of respectable survivors (according to the middle-class point of view). Middle- class reformers discovered the savages in their midst, those who embraced their dead, and sought to reform such behavior through exhortation (apparently not very successfully, since medical men reported being ignored at least initially) and legislation. Towards the conclusion of his Practice of Interment in Towns, Edwin Chadwick advocates passing prohibitory ordinances with penalties and the establishment of 111 metropolitan medical police, “medical officers of health,” who would be responsible for investigating deaths, “verification of the fact and cause of death, and its due civic registration,” presumably in order to be sure that neither fraud nor foul play slid by unnoticed (Chadwick, Report 159). These rules would have required the medical officers of health to act quite literally as medical police in their “jurisprudential duties of protecting the interests of the community in cases of deaths which have occurred under circumstances of suspicion or of manifest criminality” (Chadwick, Report 159). The medical police would also have ensured that survivors conducted themselves according to accepted notions by offering “counsel and direction to survivors in the event of a death” as well as monitoring and guiding personal and environmental cleanliness by “directing measures of immediate precaution and prevention” to check the spread of contagious diseases (Chadwick, Report 159). No such startlingly regulatory legislation granting complete policing powers in the name of social control was immediately forthcoming; however, the 1849 Health of Towns Act established the General Board of Health (which issued directives to local government and parish officials who generally ignored them) and empowered local government officers to investigate and report upon “filthy living quarters” and require the property owner or occupier to “cleanse, whitewash, or otherwise purify . . . or abate or remove the nuisance or matter injurious to health,” including removing occupants or sick persons (qtd. in Baker 479, 489). Although the medical officer’s powers were not so great as those that Chadwick advocated, the November 6, 1848, Circular of the General Board of Health did authorize medical officers to direct “care, removal, and the time of the interment of the body” (qtd. in Baker 489). By policing and controlling the behavior or environment of the poorer classes, the General 112 Board of Health sought to control the rate of disease and death engendered in the rookeries and slums, but such control also created intrusive investigative and disciplinary machinery directed specifically against the poor and working classes. In order to control disease, social reformers sought to reform the behavior and bodies of the working classes and poor, including not only the state of living bodies but also that of dead bodies. The appalled yet indefatigable discoverers of urban horrors lurking in the slums and rookeries of London persistently and aggressively decried the appalling impropriety of the poorer classes’ pre-burial customs. The first evil resulting from the working class’s pre-burial customs was purely physical. Reformers avidly attacked the health consequences of poorly managed metropolitan burial grounds from which supposedly deadly graveyard miasmas crept, but half-buried or disinterred bodies in the full flower of decomposition were less dangerous to the living than freshly dead bodies. Many medical men testify that from the last breath the corpse was hazardous to the well-being of the survivors. Dr. Macartney claims that “‘The two stages of decomposition in the dead body, which render the animal substance most dangerous, are that which takes place immediately after death, and the extreme degree of putrefaction’” (Macartney qtd in Walker 131). W. Dyce Gathrie, speaking for himself and “‘a number of other medical witnesses,’” argues that ‘the public health is much more affected by the pestiferous influence of the corpse during the interval of time that occurs from the moment of death up to the hour of the funeral, than it commonly is or can be after interment.’ (qtd. in Chadwick, Report 42) Southwood Smith, agreeing with many of the medical witnesses who testified on this issue, states that “‘the most dangerous period for the examination of bodies is from four 113 to five hours after the fatal event, and while the body is yet warm’” (qtd. in Chadwick, Report 16). Hence, during the laying out and viewing, “the retention of the remains in the one room of the living brings the effluvium to bear directly upon the survivors when it is most dangerous” and the survivors were physically and mentally most vulnerable, which enabled disease rapidly to take a mortal grip on the survivors (Chadwick, Report 42). Doctor Leonard recounts an instance wherein a grandmother and her infant grandchild died of fever. Refusing to permit the doctor to remove the corpses, the family kept the corpses on the one bed in their room, so “‘[t]he corpse of the grandmother lay beside her husband on the same bed’” (Chadwick, Report 33). Once the dead woman’s husband became delirious from fever, the medical officer ordered the bodies removed to a fever hospital dead-room. Even so, the grandfather and two children died of the fever, leaving the death toll at five out of six family members. Leonard goes on to recount a handful of stories with similar plots, ending his train of horrors with a note: “‘These are a few cases only . . . I could multiply them, if necessary’” (Chadwick, Report 34). In addition, surgeons (Mr. Byles, Mr. Barnett, and Mr. Abraham) and a relieving officer (Mr. Bestow) narrate similar stories of infection and death following the retention of the corpse in the family’s living area. ii The dead body threatened the physical well-being of the living, but Chadwick reveals a far more ominous threat that the spectacle of the corpse’s protracted presence generated—emotional and moral blight. “Great, however, as may be the physical evils to them,” Chadwick warns, “the evidence of the mental pain and moral evil generally attendant on the practice of the long retention of the body in the rooms in use and amidst the living . . . is yet more deplorable” (Chadwick, Report 44). Novels repeatedly 114 demonstrate the value of gazing upon the beautiful corpse, frequently representing the corpse-viewing as something tending to soothe the witnesses and add to their moral stamina by helping them reconcile themselves to the death in particular and death in general. In striking contrast, sanitarians insisted that the spectacle of the corpse does not promote reconciliation and acceptance but reminded survivors of their loss and acted as “a perpetual stimulus to excessive grief, and . . . a source of painful associations,” the strain of which threatened physical well-being and led to the first stage of moral decay— familiarity (Chadwick, Report 44). At first, the corpse’s presence produced grief and powerful feelings, but prolonged exposure to the corpse resulted in an incessant stimulation of feelings that eventually wore out the capacity to feel and made survivors familiar with the real form of death in all its putridity. Moral blight, then, took root and spread when survivors became “so familiar with death that their feelings are not hurt by it’” (Chadwick, Report 41). The second manifestation of moral decay, springing from familiarity and over-stimulation of feeling, was indifference. Generalizing about the lower classes, one medical officer states, “‘What I observe when I first visit the room is a degree of indifference to the present of the corpse: the family is found eating or drinking or pursuing their usual callings, and the children playing’” (Chadwick, Report 35). The “‘lower classes’” were indifferent to their dead, evidenced by the family’s “normal” behavior. A clergyman adds, “‘From familiarity it is a short stop to desecration’” in which the unfeeling survivors treated the body in a manner that is an “‘outrage upon human feeling’” (Chadwick, Report 46). Greater affection and respect for the dead turned inside out, producing demoralization and disrespect. A third manifestation of demoralization was an aversion to the body that once generated so many affectionate 115 thoughts. Greatly differing from the novel’s unchanging beautiful corpse, the real corpse is a site of human dissolution that points to discontinuity embodied in the “visible images of the changes wrought in death” (Chadwick, Report 45). Such change pushed the dead body from its honored place as the remains of a loved one into the status of an abject thing. Chadwick and his witnesses caution the public that watching “the progress of change and decomposition disfiguring the remains and adding disgust to familiarity,—are attested to be of the most demoralizing character” (Chadwick, Report 45). Excessive feeling gave way to familiarity, which led to blighted sensibility and improper feeling (disgust) towards the dead. iii Familiarity led to indifference towards the dead loved one; indifference led to the destruction of individual’s feelings and sympathy for other people, which when propagated amongst a mass of people threatened to lead to community blight and mass social failure. “[C]rimes, like sores,” Chadwick reasons, “will commonly be found to be the result of wider influences than are externally manifest” (Chadwick, Report 45). Arguing that “the mental and moral quality of a people materially depend on their physical organization; that causes injuriously affecting the latter, must surely and inevitably blunt the susceptibility,” sanitarians insisted that living conditions influenced both moral and physical well-being (Walker 112). Consequently, it was living conditions that produced “the prevalence of habits of savage brutality and carelessness of life amongst the labouring population” that the middle classes found so disturbing (Chadwick, Report 45). Living in squalor, in other words, cultivated disease of the body and mind, fever and immorality. Brutalizing conditions did not consist of low pay, high rent, lack of universal free education, or unadulterated food. The “wider influences” and 116 “demoralizing circumstances” were physical squalor—living among filth and effluvium of all sorts—and “Disrespect for the human form under suffering, indifference or carelessness at death” (Chadwick, Report 45). Then, the fourth form of moral dissolution familiarity engendered was indifference to death in general, which was compounded with survivor indifference towards their dead in particular. Survivors “‘have gazed upon it [the corpse] so perpetually, they have grown intimate with its terrors, that they no longer dread it’” (Chadwick, Report 46). Not dreading the corpse did not produce the sort of relieved fearlessness of death that Margaret Hale expresses at Bessy Higgins’s viewing. Far different, the “‘wholesome fear of death . . . is the last hold upon a hardened conscience’” keeping morality intact by ensuring that the living commit no crimes against one another (Chadwick, Report 46). No longer dreading death, the survivors no longer dreaded the scaffold, which kept their criminal tendencies in check. Indifference to the terrors of death led to an indifference towards life and law. A “benevolent” clergyman supports Chadwick’s claim, remarking further that “‘when the respect for the dead . . . for the human form in its most awful stage, is gone, the whole mass of social sympathies must be weakened—perhaps blighted and destroyed’” (Chadwick, Report 46). In other words, the mass of working people are in danger of becoming a mass of demoralized (amoral if not immoral) brutes because they are too familiar with death. iv Living laborers threatened society with their intemperance, brutality, criminality, political agitation, and exploding birth and mortality rates; their dead bodies threatened society by rendering the living laborers more brutal. The dead body, it seems, might pose a greater threat than the Chartist agitator. 117 Even though problems of disposing of the body in a timely manner according to the requirements set by the new respectability were those with which both the poorer classes and middle classes struggled, social reformers directed their campaign to alter and control the public’s practices and perceptions at the poor and working classes. Like their less fortunate fellow citizens, the middle classes found “The expense of interments . . . a most severe infliction” (Chadwick, Report 46). However, the witnesses who condemned the laboring classes’ delay did not criticize the delay among the middle and upper classes even though medical men claimed that the freshly dead corpse was poisonous to all. Middle-class survivors, even those exposed to the dead body, did not suffer from excessive or blighted feelings. Working-class survivors demonstrated “‘a degree of indifference to the presence of the corpse,” but “‘Amongst the middle classes, where there is an opportunity of putting the corpse by itself, there are greater marks of respect and decency’” and “‘feelings of awe and respect’” (Chadwick, Report 35, 46). In addition, a medical officer remonstrates, “‘Amongst that class [the middle class] no one would think of doing anything in the room where the corpse was lying, still less of allowing children there’” (Chadwick, Report 35). v Wild, the undertaker, states that among the middle classes “‘There is certainly much less delay . . . but with them the corpses are early placed either in lead or in double coffins,” allowing the fortunately affluent classes to escape prolonged sight of the dead body and so escape the corpse’s tendency to make monsters of its mourners (Chadwick, Report 15). Nevertheless, because middle-class families most certainly did not store coffins in their dwellings in case someone died, inevitably there was some exposure to the corpse’s contaminating presence. Still, middle-class corpses did not poison their surviving friends and family 118 members. Subjected to the same miasmas, the middle classes evidently were not subjected to the same degree of contagious outbreaks of disease and moral disorder as the working classes. On one hand, the middle and upper classes remain unfamiliar with the corpse because their wealth afforded them the custom of concealing the body in a coffin and removing that coffin from sight into a room that the family did not require on a daily basis. Thus, they were saved. On the other hand, underclass families violated principles of respectability regarding treatment of the dead. The violation went further than insisting upon performing pre-burial duties. First, the poor daily lived with the uncoffined corpse, seeing and, even worse, touching the putrid flesh. The bereaved family members persistently demonstrated an apparently unabated affection, literally embracing the dead bodies and even sharing their beds despite witnessing the body’s dissolution into advanced putridity. Dr. Leonard, medical office and surgeon of St-Martin’s-in-the-Fields, attributes the high incidence of contagion spread by corpses among the working classes to “‘affectionate attentions to the mortal remains of their relatives, which all are anxious to bestow, and which . . . make them loath to part with them” (Chadwick, Report 32; emphasis added). Dissenting from the social control project of sanitarians, the survivors ensured the dignity of themselves and their dead and proved their humanity by literally and figuratively embracing their dead. vi Secondly, sanitarians complained that among the poor, the dead body was ever “‘mixed up with all the ordinary functions of daily life,’” mixed up with eating, drinking, and sleeping. A medical officer of Whitechapel Union acknowledges that the laboring classes must lay out the body in their living space since “‘[n]early the whole of the labouring population there have only one room. The corpse is 119 therefore kept in that room where the inmates sleep and have their meals’” (Chadwick, Report 34). A magistrate of Keighley parish in Yorkshire counters a select committee chairman’s disapprobation on the mixing of living and dead bodies by pointing out that “when a house consists of nothing but one room, how can it be otherwise?” (Report from the Select Committee on Management 27). Witnesses agree that the crowded housing situation necessitating the coexistence of living bodies and dead bodies was an inescapable environmental circumstance for the laboring classes. Nevertheless, these sanitarians sought to investigate and reform underclass customs rather than concentrating upon the housing situation (at least not until the second half of the century). The primary subject of investigation was not crowded housing but how the underclasses used their living space. The economy produced a situation—crowded housing and squalid living— then “discovered” the “evils” of the very situation it created, blaming and censuring the laborers for the conditions over which they have no control. Dissenters embraced the corpses of family, friends, and members of the community. Even a maligned community composed of ruined unfortunates and social refuse—paupers whom the Poor Law Amendment Act forced into a group— demonstrated community solidarity by embracing the dead bodies of fellow paupers as if they were family even though they may have been strangers. Echoing the concern expressed in various Select Committee and Royal Commission reports during the early 1840s, the 1842 Report from the Select Committee on Management of Poor in Keighley Union obsessively circles around deviations in proper pre-burial handling of the dead, particularly instances of inappropriate proximity between the living and the dead. At the same time, this investigation reveals that for the pauper inmates, mixing survivors and 120 corpses was a deliberate choice that maintained a community including those who have died. Waterhouse, the Keighley workhouse master, viewed the mixing of living and dead in the same quarters “as an evil that had troubled me greatly” but which he admitted repeatedly occurred (Report from the Select Committee on Management 76; emphasis added). Waterhouse shifted the blame for the “evil” onto the paupers who, he claimed, held deviant views on the proper treatment of the dead. “[W]hen one dies,” he explains to the committee’s chairman, “we say to the survivors, ‘Do you wish it to be removed;’ and they say ‘No;’ for they have an idea it will be their turn” (Report from the Select Committee on Management 76). Life and death in the poorhouse bound paupers together by their status as social redundancies and lesions on the body of laissez-faire political economy. In turn, pauper inmates affirmed their shared status by insisting on solidarity even with their dead fellows, keeping the corpse near rather than permitting poorhouse staff to relegate it to “what we [the poorhouse staff] call the washhouse” (Report from the Select Committee on Management 76). Clearly unable to comprehend the paupers’ choice, another committee member, Mr. Grimsditch, asks, “You say they have ideas that it will be their turn; what do you mean by that?” Obliged to interpret the oddities of his pauper inmates, the poorhouse master replies, All men are mortal, and they expect to die, that is the meaning of it; and because of that, they will consent to sleep in the same room where the dead body is, rather than consent to have it moved to an unlikely place. (Report from the Select Committee on Management 76) Grimsditch incredulously asks for elaboration (notably, three committee members ask about the same subject, evidently finding it difficult to believe such violations in proper distance between the living and dead would be countenanced in a governmental 121 institution), and Waterhouse repeats that “they would like their body to remain in the same room” (Report from the Select Committee on Management 76). The inmates at Keighley Poorhouse demonstrate an alternative mode of thinking about and treating the dead. The dead do belong to the living, not because crowded conditions enforce proximity while poverty requires prolongation of that closeness, but because keeping the dead nearby is community. The affluent too could participate in a community with the dead but only on a purely contemplative level and only when a stable memorial displaced the actual body. Wordsworth and later burial reformers theorized an alternative idea of a community of the living and the dead—one without dead bodies. The value of the dead to the living formed the basis for this community’s creation, but this value was available to the living only in the absence of the dead body. William Wordsworth’s “Essay Upon Epitaphs” (1810), greatly influential among later burial reformers (Chadwick, for instance, included a sizeable expert of it in his Practice of Interment in Towns as a potential pattern for burial reform), proclaims that the purpose of a burial place is to safeguard the sanctity of the corpse and to present “a record to preserve the memory of the dead, as a tribute due to his individual worth,” for the mourners and “for the common benefit of the living” (Wordsworth 34). The memorial is a worthy object of contemplation in part because it suggests a form of immortality; the tombstone and epitaph assure the living that death does not obliterate the individual since the memorial condenses and safeguards the individual personality. The setting wherein the living meet the dead in the form of inscribed stone, the churchyard “is a visible centre of a community of the living and the dead” (Wordsworth 34). Salutary contemplation and community can only occur in an 122 environment that offers “the soothing influence of nature” and “those types of renovation and decay” that suggest immortality through constant renewal (Wordsworth 33). The proper environment in which to cultivate a community of the living and the dead is one that conceals human decay and the fact that death is indeed the end. Overt evidence of dead bodies situated in the midst of ugliness and urban decay that does nothing to hide death hinders the burial ground’s function. In contrast to the parklike ideal Wordsworth advocates, “the unsightly manner in which our monuments are crowded together in the busy, noisy, unclean, and almost grassless churchyard of a large town” negates the burial ground’s potential for offering a context for profitable contemplation of the death (Wordsworth 33). Wordsworth’s community of the living and the dead is an abstract one in which the grave displaces the corpse and allows the living to imagine an ideal of continuity instead of the terrible fact that the dead body points to oblivion. Wordsworth then contributed to the crusade of social control by setting the standards for the good body: not a body at all but a memorial with an appropriate epitaph in the correct environment, one which only the relatively affluent could afford, in contrast to the urban, insalubrious, and decidedly un-poetic burial grounds to which the poor were relegated. Burial reformers of the 1840s continued to develop the notion of the good corpse as a concealed one and the decidedly bad corpse as a corpse that lacks a tasteful monument that displaces putrid flesh or one partly regurgitated by the ground in which it was buried. Sanitarians sought to reform the thought and practice of the poor and working classes; burial reformers sought to regulate the wealthier classes’ thought and practice in addition to continuing the campaign to police treatment of the poorer classes’ corpses. Of course, neither the working classes nor the poor had the leisure to visit 123 cemeteries to improve their morals by contemplating death abstracted; the burial reformers, then, aimed their persuasion at those who did have that leisure—namely, the wealthier classes. John Claudius Loudon, a burial reformer whose book On the Laying out, Planting, and Managing of Cemeteries (1843) significantly influenced taste in cemetery management, persistently stresses that the cemetery’s object is “the improvement of the moral sentiments” and “the moral feelings” (Loudon 1, 8). Moral improvement by the contemplation of the dead is predicated foremost upon the living never exposing themselves to contact—visual or physical—with the dead body. Writing on “A Visit to the General Cemetery at Kensal Green” (1842), cemetery advocate Laman Blanchard enthuses, “With no heavy or morbid oppression of the spirit [that comes of seeing corpses], we are yet with the dead, . . . and we linger in peaceful reflection” (186). A key component of this discourse about the dead required the corpse’s displacement by a stable object. Thus, burial rendered the dead safe, even salutary, to contemplate because there was no decaying body to familiarize the viewer with death or horrify her with a vision of human dissolution. Many burial reformers proclaimed that seeing the corpse that has displaced its monument (by disinterment) radically threatened the onlooker’s moral integrity. Moral improvement was a secondary concern of the cemetery’s design while interment ensuring that the dead “shall not prove injurious to the [health and feelings of the] living” was of primary concern (Loudon 1). Both functions of cemeteries are in fact one function—preventing the living from seeing the dead and becoming morally contaminated by such a sight. Post-burial treatment of the dead united the first concern about protecting corpses from desecration and the second concern about protecting the living from the demoralizing contact—visual or physical—with the dead. 124 In this endeavor, it is most important that “a coffin, after it is once interred, should never again be exposed to view, nor a human bone disturbed” (Loudon 2). For the hapless person who witnesses disinterred “bones,” “the pure and exquisite sentiment that should embalm the memory of the dead is stifled” because the disinterred corpse “weighs us down with a sense of things the most sickening and repulsive” (Blanchard 178). Burial reformers believed that contemplating the dead led to a greater valuation of life, but survivors can extract this value only by contemplating a well-laid out burial ground, one that resembles a park rather than a churchyard burial ground. Joining the undertakers in the endeavor to protect the living from all contact with the dead, burial reformers in the 1830s implied that protecting the morals of the living required that cemeteries be designed with the aim of concealing their function as depositories for the dead. In response, through the 1830s and 1840s, joint stock companies created expensive garden cemeteries, such as Kensal Green (1832), which were designed to induce quiet contemplation and profound moral feelings by providing an Arcadian landscape for the repose of the dead. Respectable burial, which ensured that once buried the corpse would ever remain concealed in its grave, was available only to the affluent who could afford to bury their dead in patented anti-body-snatching coffins, family vaults, and brick-lined graves in the new and expensive privately owned cemeteries protected by high walls. These modes of burial protected bodies from disinterment first at the hands of resurrectionists and later by the sexton’s shovel in the process of removing the remains to the charnel house in order to make room for more dead bodies. The poor, on the other hand, were obliged to bury their dead in grotesquely over-crowded and unprotected burial grounds, their bodies 125 vulnerable to body-snatchers and groundskeepers who had remains disinterred for profit. Burial continued in grounds that had been in use for hundreds of years or that were recently founded speculations whose investors profited from overloading the clayey London soil with bodies to such an extent that in some places “[t]he substratum was . . . so saturated with dead, that the . . . ground was subsequently raised,” even to the level of the first-floor windows of the surrounding houses (Walker 163). In order to continue burying in such ground, it was necessary to open graves continually, break the coffins (sometimes selling the wood to the poor who could not afford untainted wood for burning), and mutilate the remains by dismembering and crushing them. Sometimes gravediggers disinterred bodies within months of the burial so that the parts exposed were “fresh” and “quite perfect” to those who beheld them (Walker; Effect of Interment). vii Disinterment for the purpose of “making room” in the ground was not the only poor burial practice. According to one report in 1838, at Enon Chapel, infamous for its “masses of corruption,” the burial vault beneath the church “[was] crowded at one end, even to the top of the ceiling, with dead” (Walker 155). Vaults were left unsealed, coffins buried sometimes ten deep in a single grave with the final one within less than one foot of the surface, and graves were left open for as long as it took for them to be filled, which could be days or weeks. The putrefying corpse, thus exposed, created hideously unhealthy conditions for the working classes who were obliged to live in buildings surrounding the many fetid urban burial grounds and deeply offended even physicians and surgeons accustomed to the sight of the dead. Sanitarians followed the problematic body from death to the grave, but burial reformers continued to follow the trajectory of danger into the grave, which became yet 126 another origin of disease and horror engendered in and by the corpses of the underclasses. Like the sanitarians, the burial reformers found that the worst bodies were those of the poor. Again, here, investigations into dead bodies and their dangers became another investigation and policing of the corpse belonging to the poor and working classes. Even in their graves, the dead of the poorer classes were not safe from the investigatory eye of social reformers. The newer cemeteries where the affluent buried their dead were on the outskirts of London while the most egregiously managed and overloaded grounds were in the city itself. Consequently, the burial grounds under the most intense scrutiny and criticism in the writings of burial reformers were those used by the poor whose corpses were the visible symbols of miasma-generated disease and immorality. George Alfred Walker’s Gatherings from Graveyards, House of Commons’s Effect of Interment of Bodies in Towns, and Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Result of Special Inquiry into Practice of Interment in Towns make clear that the remnant’s residue can sicken or kill even those accustomed to the exposure to the dead. Before fevers were differentiated and their etiology identified in the latter half of the century, there were two primary theories of the cause of disease—contagion theory and miasma theory—although these were not by any means mutually exclusive. The miasmists theorized that unhealthy exhalations from decomposing filth created infectious disease by producing an “epidemic atmosphere” (a theory accepted by sanitarians and the Privy Council). Many medical professionals argued that graveyard miasma, those gasses naturally given off by the putrefying body and “dead water” or “soup” (the liquefied flesh and organs), generates diseases, including typhoid, typhus, and other fevers (Walker; Effect of Interment). John Claudius Loudon writes, “To inhale this [corpse] gas, undiluted . . . is instant death; and, 127 even when much diluted, it is productive of disease” (5). Walker ominously concludes that the high rate of ill health, fevers, and death among people living near burial grounds—often the very poorest of the working classes obliged to live near the dead for lack of any other options—is because “the burying grounds of the metropolis . . . are so over-charged with dead, and even saturated with the products of putrefaction” (Walker 148). In fact, Walker argues, “a large proportion of those diseases . . . may be increased, if not generated, by exhalations arising from the putrefaction of dead bodies” (Walker 2- 3). Dozens of gravediggers and inhabitants of the crowded neighborhoods surrounding urban burial ground agree—corpses generated disease and death. The corpses whose decomposing parts the gravedigger’s shovel indecently exposed served as “the instruments of punishment to the living” by adding to their ranks those whom they killed by contagion (Walker 10). The unburied bad corpse threatened only the survivors, their friends, neighbors, and community; the poorly buried, half-disinterred, dismembered, putrid corpses of the unfortunate classes threatened the health and morals of all classes. These dead bodies, buried in the busy metropolis burial grounds and churchyards situated near markets and well-trodden areas, exposed all who walked through the city to their dreadful miasmas and the sight of decayed human flesh. Mere exposure to the sight of a putrefying corpse reversed the effect gained by contemplating the memorial; this practice destroyed, not rehabilitated, the moral fiber of society, not just individuals or select groups. Testifying on the indecency of metropolitan burial grounds, the Reverend John Blackburn declares, “‘I am sure the moral sensibilities of many delicate minds must sicken to witness the heaped soil, saturated and blackened with human remains and fragments of the dead’” 128 (Chadwick, Report 134). Blackburn’s “‘delicate minds’” most likely refers to the more sensible upper and middle classes rather than the working classes whom many considered coarse in thought and feeling. The working-class corpse, then, threatened to brutalize its betters. Physician and burial reform advocate George Alfred Walker more urgently warns his readers that interment in towns is “the cause, direct or indirect, of inhumanity, immorality, and irreligion” (Walker iii). Working-class witnesses too decried the offense to decency and good health created by disinterment, spoke of the horror of seeing the body parts of their own recently buried relatives lying dismembered on the surface of the burial ground, and reported instances of ill health and death among those who lived in housing surrounding burial grounds. The poorer classes found no community with their disinterred dead. The unearthed corpse—putrid, chopped up, disemboweled, and dismembered—was an offense and a danger to all. Until the middle of the century, it seems that novels portray little horror of corpses’ physical and moral contagion or even a horror of the dead body as a dead body. Coming upon a dead body was horrible precisely because it was a life extinguished not because of any horror of the corpse itself. One text in which horror of dead flesh would seem to be most apposite, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), includes copious amounts of horror in relation to a reanimated compilation of dead flesh, but it is a horror not specifically associated with the body’s physical origins. In seeking the secret of life, Frankenstein turns to the grave. Having “‘dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave . . . [and] charnel-houses,’” Victor Frankenstein learns “‘The tremendous secrets of the human frame’” while dead flesh stolen from “‘[t]he dissecting room and the slaughterhouse’” provides the materials he uses to assemble his “‘filthy creation’” 129 (Shelley 56). Nonetheless, the fact that this creature is made from dead (and probably slightly putrid) flesh does not seem to be responsible for the horror it later engenders in all who gaze upon it. Characters consistently attribute the creature’s horrible appearance to “its gigantic stature, and the deformity of its aspect, more hideous than belongs to humanity” (Shelley 82). The only indication that the creature is cobbled from dead flesh is firstly Frankenstein’s description of “clouded,” “dull yellow,” and “watery eyes . . . almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set,” which hint at the clouding of the corneas after death (Shelley 212, 60). Secondly, implying mild mummification, Victor speaks of the “‘yellow skin . . . shrivelled complexion and straight black lips,” and Walton describes “one vast hand . . . in colour and apparent texture like that of a mummy” (Shelley 60, 256). Even so, the slightly mummified flesh and clouded eyes are not the features that instigate such terror and shrieking from those who gaze upon the creation. viii The monster inspires fear because its face and limbs are distinctly not human—inhuman in proportion and ugliness—rather than because it is a reanimated compilation of partially putrefied parts of dead bodies. For the most part, during the first half of the nineteenth century, it does not appear that novels followed the social reformer’s campaign to make the corpse horrible or disavow the dead body’s status as human. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847-48) still includes the corpse (albeit an abstract rather than a particular dead body) in the category of the human. Describing how after “[t]he doctor will come up to us too for the last time there, . . . The nurse will look in at the curtains, and you take no notice” because “you” (the reader) are dead, the narrator most strikingly situates the reader as the dying and dead body (Thackeray 699). This narrative twist is not an exercise in terror, for the corpse 130 is not a thing. Death is the end of life’s arc but not one that renders the dead body something other. “That second-floor arch in a London house,” Thackeray writes, that upon which “They rest the coffins . . . or pass them through” is also the one that stands over “that stair, up or down which babies are carried, old people are helped, . . . the parson walks to the christening, the doctor to the sick-room, and the undertaker’s men to the upper floor” (Thackeray 698-699). Life and death, in the flesh, share this arch through which passes and re-passes the arc of life—birth, life being lived, and death. The dead body is not a thing to be ejected but to be set briefly albeit passively within the midst of life. Even the corpse in bed with vibrant, innocent youth does not lead to terror and disease. At Lowood School, Helen Burns of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) slowly dies from consumption (tuberculosis) even while her fellow malnourished and neglected boarding students suffer and perish from “fog-bred pestilence,” typhus (108). Even though Jane “still recoiled at the dread of seeing a corpse,” she visits her friend on her deathbed and finds her “so little changed that my fear was instantly dissipated,” for pious Helen is dying an indubitably good death (Brontë 112). Jane falls to sleep snuggled with her dying friend but wakes next morning “in somebody’s arms,” the nurse’s, only to find a day or two afterwards . . . that Miss Temple, on returning to her own room at dawn, had found me laid in the little crib; my face against Helen Burns's shoulder, my arms round her neck. I was asleep, and Helen was— dead. (Brontë 114) Helen’s corpse makes no appearance in the text, for after Jane falls asleep in her arms, the text’s next reference to her is her grave, “a grassy mound” (Brontë 114). Nevertheless, Jane does kiss and sleep with a contagious body that becomes a dead body in her arms, 131 and though Jane previously expressed trepidation over the idea of seeing a dead body and certainly she must have felt more fear at the idea of touching a dead body, she expresses neither horror nor regret after having slept with a corpse. Jane does not fear contact with the dead because, for her, it seems that severe illness and death do no disassociate Helen’s body from Helen’s personality, which would have left behind only a horrible shell. Sanitarians and Poor Law officials insisted that the horror of death and the threat dead flesh posed to the living developed during excessive participation in pre-burial care and while maintaining a physical community of the living and the dead. In novels, horror arises when families abandon the dead loved one. According to sanitarians, seeing the dead day after day is mentally abrasive, leads to depression and emotional and moral blight; in novels, not attending to the dead leads to depression and mental disorder. After no doctor would visit “his miserable abode,” Arthur Morton, the poor Chartist agitator and hero of Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow (1849-50), loses his eldest son to fever. Arthur’s subsequent severe depression incapacitates him, which obliged strangers—the doctor and the nurse he hires to prepare the body—to attend to the pre- burial care and funeral arrangements. Morton neither participates in the laying out nor sits up with nor even views his dead son’s body, and “it was not until the corpse was about being borne from the house that he [Morton] showed any signs of being conscious of the loss that had befallen him” (Wheeler 164). Once the funeral necessitates removing the dead body from house to grave, survivors lose access to the corpse and consequently cannot reconcile themselves to the death by caring for and watching the dead or distancing themselves from the body before the burial. Morton has neither embraced the 132 dead body nor reconciled himself to the loss and thus neglects his duty. Arthur’s wife too fails to fulfill the duties owed to her son. Incapacitated by physical illness, this disconsolate mother, grieved in silence as only a mother can grieve, that she was denied the privilege of seeing the last duties performed to her lost child, and . . . he [Arthur] who should have been a shield and a consolation in this, their day of mutual tribulation—he was a frantic madman, raving continually of past joys, embittering the sorrow of the present hour, by insane reminiscences of by-gone hopes. (Wheeler 164-165; emphasis added) Attending to the dead is a privilege as well as a duty while neglecting such a duty represents a violation, the penalty of which is torment. Performing the pre-burial duties might have eased their loss, but neglect drives a father insane and a mother to silent grief. Dissenting from the increasingly vociferous articulations by medical men, sanitarians, and reformers upon the terrible threat of the dead body, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) demonstrates that the best dead body is the well-loved one, and the best survivors are those who prove their humanity by incorporating the dead into their lives. For those who love their dead family members, viewing or sitting near the corpse does not demoralize them but helps them reconcile themselves to the loss. Tim Cratchit’s father breaks down when talking to his wife about visiting the green graveyard in which his son will soon be buried, weeping, “‘My little, little child!’” (Dickens, Christmas Carol 74). Such an outburst of grief demonstrates his continued affection for his son, for, the narrator remarks, “He couldn’t help it. If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther apart perhaps than they were” (Dickens, Christmas Carol 74). It is not until Cratchit sits by and contemplates the body that he feels at peace with the death. He 133 went up-stairs into the room above, which was lighted cheerfully . . . There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of someone having been there, lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what had happened, and went down again quite happy. (Dickens, Christmas Carol 74) Viewing the corpse eases Cratchit’s grief since the viewing provides a context wherein Cratchit “thought a little and composed himself” (Dickens, Christmas Carol 74). Most importantly, “Poor Bob” feels “reconciled to what had happened” and is therefore able, after his previous breakdown, to go “down again quite happy” to join his family (Dickens, Christmas Carol 74). The “signs” Bob sees are probably signs of affect, perhaps the little arm was moved, maybe someone’s tears remained on the little hands or face, or it could be a flower by the bedside or a half-used candle marking the minutes or hours of the watcher’s time there. Whatever the signs may be, it is apparent that Bob Cratchit is not the only one of his family to visit the little corpse. No one shuns the body, which implies that the family for a brief time maintains a place for Tim in their thoughts and daily lives. This is no strange thing upstairs, slowly putrefying, but a remnant of a much-loved child, the viewing of whom eases rather than exacerbates grief. Death, then, does not immediately break social ties; this dead son still has a father who claims the dead flesh as his child, and such perception of continued familial status and relations demonstrates strong continued affection for the dead person, extended to that person’s dead body. The closer the family activities to the dead body, the more intimate the relationship between living and dead and, implicitly, the more profound the family’s love for the dead person. 134 Tiny Tim’s well-loved body counters sanitarians’ claims about the corpse’s fundamental badness. In the novel, the horrible dead body is the forsaken corpse bereft of loving survivors. Fear of the corpse here is fear not of its fundamentally corrupt nature but of a neglected and desecrated body—the consequence of dying alone. The fear of dying alone preceded and engendered the horror of the neglected corpse. Mournfully predicting “‘there is not one to raise his hand above my bed when I lie dead upon it, and say, “It is a blessing he is gone,”’” the Chancery prisoner of Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers dreads and yet expects to die alone, the pathetic, epitomized end to a sad and lonely life (627). Incarcerated without friends and family, being “dead to society,” he does die alone, for there are none who will sit by him during his body’s last struggles. Indeed, his fellow prisoners do not notice his last breath because none sit by him, and “he had grown so like death in life, that they knew not when he died” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 627, 873). Published six years later, A Christmas Carol indicates that such a death threatens the dying not merely with loneliness but, more horribly, the probability of postmortem desecration. In A Christmas Carol, the unloved body, even that of a middle- class man who can afford to pay strangers to care for his corpse, is forlorn and wretched, subjected to indignity and desecration. The living find these corpses distressing to behold because they represent the horrors of lonely death and the most horrible future for the living body, that of being a forsaken corpse. Ebenezer Scrooge’s mismanagement of his personal affairs leads to his self- imposed solitude in life. Fulfilling the fate allotted to the solitary person, Scrooge’s body lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a woman, or a child, to say he was kind to me in this or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. (Dickens, Christmas Carol 71) 135 Scrooge obliterated himself from his social context during life; death merely renders this obliteration irrevocable. There will be none who care to remember who he was or what he did, much less to care for his body. Members of the middle class could afford to pay a stranger to perform the duties due to the dead, and yet purchased care did not protect the dead body. Scrooge has made arrangements for his corpse to be laid out and watched, but his shillings expose his dead body to desecration rather than shielding it. The charwoman, the laundress, and the undertaker’s man who are paid to care for Scrooge and his house rob the body and leave it unwatched. Chillingly, Dickens implies that Scrooge’s case is not an unusual one, for the undertaker’s man is one whom the pawnbroker greets as one he has seen many times before. Having shortly before heard these three discussing their corpse-robbing with a pawnbroker, Scrooge must look upon his abused corpse, “plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept, uncared for” (Dickens, Christmas Carol 71). To his horror, he further notices that “A cat was tearing at the door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearthstone. What they wanted in the room of death, . . . Scrooge did not dare to think” (Dickens, Christmas Carol 71). Without family or friends to watch over it, the unloved corpse is just as exposed to pre-burial indecencies when left with a paid stranger as when left alone. After all, hired personnel lacked knowledge of the social individual before death and so most likely had little or no emotional attachment to or respect for the dead person. ix The middle-class body left to hired strangers is likely to become a desecrated body. The most wretched corpse is the solitary corpse. It is not in the one-room tenements of the poor about which social reformers warned that death sets up a horrible 136 altar but in this bare room in which lies a lonely corpse. The horrors of death are not to be found in the well-loved corpse, “the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou [death] canst not . . . make one feature odious,” but in the unloved corpse (Dickens, Christmas Carol 71). “Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death,” the narrator of A Christmas Carol exclaims, “set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command; for this is thy dominion!” (Dickens, Christmas Carol 71). If the dead person had so endeared himself to his friends and family when living that his survivors continue to express love for the corpse, that body (even one of a pauper) will not horrify those who gaze upon it. The fate of Scrooge’s corpse on this future Christmas evening, set upon the dreadful altar of death, is not inevitable. Scrooge has not the strength to lift the sheet and gaze upon his own dead face, but he is saved by facing his burial plot. Scrooge can save himself from complete erasure by rebuilding community ties, ensuring that he will not die unloved, unwatched, robbed, and gnawed upon. At his grave, he finds redemption for his living self and his future corpse. In the novels of the 1840s, the problem is not the corpse crowded with the living, as sanitarians and reformers of corpse care conceived it; the problem is the solitary body, exposed to desecration not because it is too much mixed with the daily lives of the survivors but rather because no one watches over and cares for it. The horror of the neglected dead body begins with the corpses of those who die a bad death wherein the unloved or unlovable person becomes an unloved and unprotected corpse and eventually a defiled object. The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) includes an infamous death, Quilp’s accidental drowning, which punishes not merely the man but also the dead body, exposing it to the elements that use it as a plaything. The current, like a rough child, 137 commences to mutilate the corpse, “now bruising it . . . now hiding it . . . now dragging it heavily over rough stones and gravel . . . until, tired of the ugly plaything, it flung it on a swamp . . . and left it there to bleach” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 696). This social reprobate, having abused all who were near him while alive, “lay alone” a “deserted carcass” left “bleaching” to be found “not until some days had elapsed” (Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop 696, 749). Unloved by any, having deserved no love, this man dies horribly and alone, the postmortem beating his corpse receives a punishment for his reprehensible lack of sympathy for others. This is the horrible afterlife promised to the hated corpse with none to care for or weep over it (although it is rumored that after the inquest the boy Tom reburies the remains in defiance of the law’s felo-de-se requirements). Those bodies that lack someone to care for them and die a bad death, their bodies violently rent, become grotesque disfigurements of the human even before putrefaction. In Dombey and Son (1846-48), as Carker flees Dombey, he inadvertently runs into the path of an oncoming train, which rips his body into “mutilated fragments” (Dickens, Dombey and Son 875). The manner of death violates the integrity of Carker’s corpse, splattering his bits across the tracks and on the road, thus rendering his flesh more accessible to hungry scavengers. These remains nearly (if not actually) become food for dogs “that sniffed upon the road” (Dickens, Dombey and Son 875). The men who interfere with the dogs’ scavenging “soaked his blood up, with a train of ashes,” which leaves the blood upon the road merely half-concealed and muddled with ashes (Dickens, Dombey and Son 875). The unloved corpse becomes inhuman as the result of desecration rather than natural processes. Corpses are not, then, fundamentally bad but are made so by external threats to their integrity. 138 By 1850, novels indicate that corpse neglect is a flagrant violation of community norms. For the “lower orders,” neglecting personally to wash and lay out the dead constituted a fundamental violation of survivors’ obligations to their lost loved ones. In novels, these neglected corpses are polluted by the sordidness of death and decomposition, horrible to look upon and potentially contaminating. In Charles Kingsley’s 1850 novel Alton Locke, Locke comes across the once-sweater now-sweated garment worker, Jemmy Downes, whom he follows to a ramshackle slum tenement in which Downes rents a room. Upon entering, Locke sees the spectacle of “three corpses laid side by side on the bare floor”: Downes’s wife, “dead—and naked; . . . the un-closed eyes stared, as if reproachfully, at the husband” (Kingsley 309). The Irish wife’s unclosed dead eyes reproach Downes for his neglect, so too the decomposition working on his children’s corpses accuses their father of callousness. Left alone with their dead mother, each dead child becomes a hardly human, “little, shriveled, impish child-corpse” (Kingsley 310). The neglected corpse, then, unloved and uncared for, becomes a decaying reproach to its living relatives. Apart from his performing one grotesque parody of laying out in having “laid their arms round the dead mother’s neck,” Downes violates those duties of caring for the dead that the working classes clung to even in the face of sanitary reform and which manifested their continued affection for their dead loved ones. Downes’s disregard of these duties is a symptom of his lack of feeling for others (also expressed by his willingness to sweat his workers instead of working with them). He behaves as if death truly obliterates all social obligations, even to flesh that he loved and flesh of his flesh. Reversing sanitarian claims that too much attention to the corpse 139 blights sensibility, this novel shows that neglect of the dead reveals blighted feelings rather than causing them. A survivor’s neglect of a corpse, particularly one of a dead family member, represents a gross indecency and violation of community expectations as well as engenders a health threat. Participating in pre-burial duties, neighbors physically and emotionally supported the bereaved and worked to help reincorporate the dead into the community of the living by acting together to express affection for and ownership of the dead. Denying his neighbors access to the corpses, Downes hinders the community’s ability to perform those functions he neglects. Even his gin-sodden neighbors declaim this neglect, “‘Oh! you unnatural villain!—To go away after your drink, and leave them poor dear dead corpses locked up, without even letting a body go in to stretch them out!’” (Kingsley 309). The community would care for the bodies, should Downes have made arrangements or even done so little as allowed his neighbors to “‘stretch them out,’” but he remains self-absorbed and self-destructive. Only by his death can the dead receive what is due to them. After Downes’s suicide by jumping out of a window into a fetid cesspool below the house, the community steps in to rectify the reprehensible neglect: “slatternly gin-smelling women [stripped] off their clothes—true women even there—to cover the poor naked corpses” (Kingsley 310). “True women” care for the dead without reluctance, clothing dead flesh in the garments off their own backs, even if those dead are not their own. This community, the members of which reformers and social scientists considered the worst sort of people, seeks to set the corpses to rights and thus repair the deplorable violation of personal duty and community expectations. Finally, besides offending his neighbors and violating class expectations, Downes’s behavior endangers 140 the community’s health. Locke is sickened when he encounters the corpses’ miasma, observing that “[t]he stench was frightful—the air heavy with pestilence,” and one of Downes’s neighbors admonishes him for “‘breeding the fever, too, to poison to whole house!’” (Kingsley 309). These three corpses do not threaten the community with their fever-bearing miasmas because the living and dead are too close. The negligent survivor is at fault because he eschews his duties, not because he adheres too faithfully to them. During the next decade, the horrible-yet-still-loved body emerges in the novel. Dickens’s 1864-65 novel Our Mutual Friend indicates that even the loved body is not safe from defilement, exhibited in the Gaffer’s case wherein his dead body becomes a plaything even though, unlike Quilp, the Gaffer is loved. Rogue Riderhood, Mr. Inspector, Wrayburn, and Lightwood pull “the form of the bird of prey, dead some hours” out of the water and draw it to shore (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 168). This is not an unloved body, for Lizzie loves her father very much, and yet this corpse is subjected to nature’s ungentle postmortem ministrations. The narrative reflects the tension between the Gaffer as abandoned body and loved corpse, referring to him as “it” and “Father” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 169). The Gaffer’s loving daughter is absent, not knowing of his condition, while those present do not protect him from nature’s rough hand. The body thus left lying “here in a heap” for even a short time is still a desecrated one: “The wind sweeps jeeringly over Father . . . tries to turn him where he lies stark on his back, and force his face towards the rising sun, that he may be shamed the more” (Dickens, Our Mutual Friend 169). There is no longer a Gaffer to feel shame and yet this man’s remains are shamed by their fate, desecrated not in some dank rented room in the London slums but in the open during the day. To a certain extent, the Gaffer’s fate is not entirely 141 undeserved. After all, he made his living from the drowned corpses he found, and so he himself becomes a drowned corpse, having met his death in seeking out the dead. Like those bodies upon which he preys, he too is subjected to the rough play of the elements, and yet his daughter’s love for him saves his fate from being an entirely ignominious one. The narrative reflects this tension between the body subjected to the bad death and the beloved body, the tormented corpse and “Father.” Only in the novel can the dead occupy two positions in this way. The narrative permits the reader to be with the corpse while yet hearing Lizzie’s voice as she, not knowing the Gaffer is dead, thinks of him as her father, a person with social connections, life, feeling, and speech rather than cold, mutilated dead flesh. A body can be a corpse and a father. Even so, being loved does not save this body from its punishment, though it does save the corpse from the reader’s unqualified horror and disgust. The unprotected corpse is one subjected to desecration by animals as well as nature’s rough play. In the fittingly titled chapter “A Den of Horrors” in George William MacArthur Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London (1844-1856), the narrator describes the brutally unsanitary and squalid environment—which includes descriptions of the dead in circumstances that violate a middle-class sense of order—found in the London slum Smithfield. A widow, the narrator recounts, laid her deceased infant on the bed in order to arrange for its funeral, and “During her absence a pig entered the room from the yard, and feasted upon the dead child’s face!” (Reynolds, Mysteries XVII). To become food is perhaps the worst fate for a neglected corpse. Scrooge is appalled that his corpse is robbed and abandoned, but that cats and rats might have access to his dead flesh is literally unthinkable (he “did not dare to think” of why animals want to be in the dead- 142 room). Even the possibility that the body will become food horrifies compassionate survivors. Although no reprobate, Bleak House’s Nemo (otherwise known as Captain Hawdon) dies alone and friendless, having long since been estranged from his friends, except for the occasional speaking acquaintance with poor Jo the street sweep. Without mourners to watch over his body, Nemo nearly becomes food for animals even as those who find his body unceremoniously search through and make off with some of his possessions. (Krook steals his letters, after which he and Tulkinghorn both rifle through his things, ostensibly to determine his identity and history.) As marine-shop owner, lawyer, and surgeon prepare to depart, leaving the corpse “a lonely figure,” Woodcourt notices Krook’s cat, Lady Jane Grey, and calls out in horror, “‘Don’t leave the cat there! . . that won’t do!’ Mr. Krook therefore drives her out before him” (Dickens, Bleak House 129-30). If not for Woodcourt, conscious of proprieties due to the dead, Nemo would have afforded a gruesome meal for Lady Jane Grey who “goes furtively down-stairs, winding her lithe tail and licking her lips,” for neither Tulkinghorn nor Krook demonstrate any interest in what happens to the body (Dickens, Bleak House 130). The sight of rats impels even neglectful Downes to try to protect his family’s bodies. His inconstancy in watching over his dead exposes the bodies to the defiling fangs of vermin, but when Downes discovers rats feeding upon his family’s bodies, he “rushed across the room in chase of two or three rats,” but sporadic gestures aimed at protecting the corpses are hardly effective, for Locke later remarks that the rats “had been busy already with them” (Kingsley 309). His dead family only becomes worthy of protection when they are gnawed upon by vermin. The dead require constant attention, without which the 143 unwatched and exposed bodies are shamed, mistreated, and defenseless against nature’s ungentle hand or animals’ teeth. Rats and cats are not the only creatures that threaten to make a feast of the unloved corpse. Often hinted at but rarely depicted in most nineteenth-century novels, cannibalism is an undercurrent in some representations of the dead body. x Having consumed itself in flames, Krook’s body leaves only grease and soot, the smell of which his finders mistake for food. Weevle conjectures that the greasy substance on the table and window means they are “‘cooking chops at the Sol’s arms,’” the neighborhood public house at which the district’s inquests take place (Dickens, Bleak House 399). Krook is quite literally a burnt piece of meat that survivors mistake for a burnt piece of meat for human consumption. As mere “chops,” Krook’s corpse (or what little there is left of it) is a conflation of man (not food) and pig (food). However, once Weevle and Guppy see and touch Krook’s remains, they find him not like chops but “offensive to the touch and sight and more offensive to the smell” (Dickens, Bleak House 401). The mode of death violates Krook’s body, and thereafter that body is defiling. Guppy, having inadvertently touched Krook’s grease on the window sill, “hastily draws his hand away,” and finding that “A thick yellow liquor defiles them,” exclaims, “‘Give me some water or I shall cut my hand off’” (Dickens, Bleak House 401, 402). Guppy is not satisfied until he “washes, and rubs, and scrubs, and smells and washes,” obsessively seeking to obliterate all sign, be it tactile, visual, or olfactory, of the defiling substance of another’s body (Dickens, Bleak House 402). Only later do Guppy and Weevle discover that the “stagnant, sickening oil” polluting the room and at least four of their five senses (presumably, no one tastes the Krook-grease) is Krook’s corpse. Despite their initial ignorance, they find that this 144 substance possesses “some natural repulsion in it that makes them both shudder” (Dickens, Bleak House 401). Man’s natural instinct recoils from contact with such an obliteration of the human that Krook’s body has become. Krook’s death is a solitary one because his secretive and abrasive manner precludes friendship while he had long been alienated from his family, the Smallweeds. Weevle and Guppy can mistake the scorched fatty remains for food and later find themselves so repulsed by them without quite knowing why because they do not know how Krook has died. Excepting the cat (that does hiss and spit at Krook’s grease), not a witness can warn the living away from any contact with the violated, polluting remnants. The undiscovered corpse, having died without witness, is certainly disgusting and potentially contaminating. Again, the corpse is not fundamentally bad or terrifying; it is the manner of death that renders it repugnant. Krook, Harry, Nemo, Carker, and Downes’s wife and children do not decide to become or be mistaken for food for either man or beast. On the other hand, Miss Havisham of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) does choose to be perceived as food after her death. Gnawed upon by her own heartache, spite, and desire for revenge, she dictates that her corpse at last will be gnawed upon by human teeth, those of her toadying and spiteful relatives, the Pockets. xi Declaring that “‘They shall come and look at me here,’” Miss Havisham demands that her blighted and withering body replace the decayed remains of the bride cake that rises “like a black fungus” from the long bridal- feast table (Dickens, Great Expectations 119). xii Fixated upon this long-contemplated ghoulish presentation of her own corpse, Miss Havisham imagines her laying out (“She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure lying there,” apparently imagining herself laid out as another remnant of the bridal feast), speaks about 145 it (detailing how and why she will be laid out thusly), and even enacts part of her design (striking with her stick where each of her family members will sit) (Dickens, Great Expectations 119). Neither loving nor truly revering their rich relative, the Pockets attend to Miss Havisham’s whims and commands, receive her verbal barbs without great complaint, and whine about one another, setting others at a disadvantage in order to please her and by pleasing her gain a larger share of an inheritance. The only one of her relatives who is not a toady and a humbug, as Pip puts it, is Mr. Matthew Pocket, who has long shunned Miss Havisham’s company, and she rewards him for his honesty by leaving him “‘a little coddleshell . . . a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket’” whereas she leaves nothing to the other Pockets (Dickens, Great Expectations 485). By directing the Pockets to feast upon her actual body, Havisham imagines a literalization of her relations’ view of her and her wealth—that they wait for her to die so that they might devour her wealth. The cat need not linger, hoping to be unnoticed, at the deathbed; and the rats need not sneak in only to scatter when someone opens the door, for this woman openly invites the carrion scavengers to feast upon her dead body. Of course, the Pockets do not really eat Miss Havisham’s corpse, but the image of Miss Havisham’s body, desecrated by her own relatives, is nonetheless chilling. Nemo, Carker, Krook, Scrooge, and Havisham are all, to some extent, isolated in life, during their last moments, or during the time between death and burial when the corpse is most vulnerable to desecration. Solitary in life or in death, these characters leave few or none to truly mourn for them and protect them out of continued affection. In these novels, the corpse is endangered rather than dangerous. Unloved, the corpse is unprotected. Unprotected, the corpse is defiled. Defiled, the corpse is a horror. 146 The threat is not the dead body among the living but the body that is left bereft, the body without loving survivors to remember the person and hence keep the body from representing merely dead, putrefying, and dangerous flesh. The novel allows the body to occupy two positions: the corpse-thing voided of the social individual and the loved one—the father, the mother, brother, or sister. Loving memory resurrects the dead while loving sentry keeps the flesh sacred. Viewing the dead as human requires that the survivors imagine that the person and body have not been severed. The loved one is, in the minds of their loving survivors, alive. If there are those to imagine the person, then the body is saved from becoming a thing. In contrast, the unloved body never again becomes human through love and memory; it is always the thing and never again father, husband, or son. Later in the century, when characters come to find corpses more disturbing, the still-human dead body surfaces when the survivor can imagine the person and the body still united, albeit because the death is not yet known. This occurs because narratives can construct a slippage permitting movement between the deceased’s personhood (the once-living individual) and non-being (the corpse). Hence a body can be a thing to those who know it is dead and yet father to she who imagines the body still living; the reader can partake of both understandings. Novels thus create the living dead. As disgusting and dangerous as corpses were, according to medical men and social reformers, they provided an invaluable service to the medical men and public at large. Like Victor Frankenstein, nineteenth-century medical men turned to the corpse in their investigations, seeking to pry from dead flesh the secrets of living flesh. Unlike the European medical men and their students who had greater access to corpses, British doctors turned to graves and charnel houses in order to procure the corpses required for 147 their anatomical training and surgical experiments. The corpse provided the material for investigation, education, museums, and publication. The surgeon’s wealth, career, and reputation were intimately tied with his ability to access and use the dead body. At the same time, methods of procuring the requisite dead bodies—the bodies of executed murderers provided the legal supply, making the surgeon an adjunct to the hangman while the disinterred or otherwise stolen bodies of the poor composed the illegal supply—threatened that reputation. The disgusting contagion of dead pauper flesh was also the most needful flesh. While sanitarians sought to police the poor in order to prevent their keeping their dead bodies, surgeons paid enormous sums of money to body- snatchers in order to keep and disassemble, pickle, and boil those same bodies. 148 Chapter Two Endnotes i The medical profession also contributed to the progressive removal of the dead body from the family’s presence. Throughout the nineteenth century, hospitals progressively acted as a buffer between the living and the dead, physically distancing healthy living bodies from dying and dead bodies. As the century progressed, death occurred less frequently among family members and more frequently among doctors in hospitals. Initially, dying in hospitals was associated with poverty, since most hospitals founded in the first half of the century were philanthropic institutions run by volunteers, governors, and trustees, and until the latter half of the century the hospitals admitted only the “deserving poor” once a week with subscribers’ recommendations, although sometimes the hospitals turned out incurables. Ruth Richardson notes that “It could truthfully be said that high hospital mortality was the price paid by the poor . . . for the advancement of scientific surgery,” since the surgeons could and did experiment upon the bodies of poor patients admitted to their hospitals, and it is important to remember that before the availability of anesthetics in the late 1840s and surgical hygiene still later in the century, the surgical mortality rate was quite high (Richardson 49). Union medical officers also reported arranging to remove ill people from their homes to fever hospitals (and expressed a desire that they possessed the power forcibly to remove those with contagious diseases to hospitals, which the 1849 Health of Towns Act granted) where between death and the funeral, the body would be placed in a dead-house rather than be returned to the family. Medical officers also sought to remove from families’ inhabitations any corpses harboring contagious disease. When charity patients died in hospitals, generally the families would not see their loved one’s bodies at all or would only be permitted to view the bodies before they were coffined and buried by the parish or hospital. Occasionally, those who died in fever hospitals were subjected to postmortem probing or outright desecration even after the Anatomy Act. Such removals conspicuously occurred primarily if not solely among the lower classes since medical officers did not compel wealthy individuals, who were able to pay for a private physician to treat them in their own homes, to move to fever hospitals, nor is it likely that affluent and respectable families would permit their dead to be placed among the corpses of paupers or strangers. In a technology-triggered reversal, affluent individuals chose to die in hospitals rather than their homes later in the century. Held to the rigors of antisepsis in the late 1860s and asepsis in the 1890s and having greater capital than private doctors with which to develop, purchase, and implement the newest medical technology (a product of increased laboratory experiment, out of which emerged vital fields like bacteriology that in turn produced preventative treatments and cures), hospitals became progressively more sophisticated. The wealthy went to hospitals because there they could obtain the latest medical treatments. Sophisticated technologies significantly escalated hospital operating expenses; consequently, hospitals began to offer beds to paying patients and required outpatients to pay for treatment, driving away the poor clientele who had historically been the hospital’s primary patients. At the same time, these medical institutions began to cater to affluent patients by offering better beds and treatment to those who paid. At first, then, medical institutions’ treatment of (and experimentation on) charity patients sometimes resulted in death, and it appears that the hospitals rarely returned those bodies to the families before burial. Later, hospitals’ inroads into the management of illness and dying enabled affluent classes to distance themselves from the dying body as well as the dead body. ii The corpse’s contagion threatened all survivors, but the very young were particularly vulnerable to the proliferation of disease brought by the dead body’s dissolution. Chadwick warns, “To the very young children, the greatest danger is of infection in cases of deaths from contagious and infectious disease,” and it is the mother’s absence that exposes her children to the dead one’s contagion (Chadwick, Report 45). Some witnesses express sympathy for the widow’s burden—her grief over the death and “‘the mental anxiety occasioned by the expense, and want of means to obtain the money’”—but Chadwick and his witnesses speak again and again not of the widow’s suffering but of the widow’s neglect of her domestic duty towards her children (Chadwick, Report 47). The allegedly high incidence of fatal contagion that seized children had “been accounted for by . . . the probability that the child had caught the disease by touching the corpse of the coffin, whilst playing about the room in the absence of the mother” who must leave her children in order to seek funds and make funeral arrangements (Chadwick, Report 44). Women perform their duty to the dead by violating their duties to the living, and yet were a widow to neglect the 149 duties due to the dead, she would be equally guilty of exposing herself and her children to the corpse’s poison. Men too have a duty “to remove the sensitive and the weakly from the spectacle” during the pre- burial period (Chadwick, Report 44). Notably, not a single witness mentions the male’s neglect of duty in relation to the corpse. It is also curious that no widowers come under the same accusation as the widows. Must not they too seek out funds to bury their wives and hence leave their children? If men ask female relatives to watch the children, why cannot widows do the same? iii Another debate involving the public’s morality circled around capital punishment and public executions. Like the sanitarians’ assertions about the demoralizing effect of familiarity with corpses and death, those advocating the abolition of public executions or capital punishment declared that public executions and their publicity (the broadsides and other pieces making the criminals into heroes or maudlin narratives of tragedy or reformation) hardens the spectators rather than deterring them from criminal activities. Most letter-writers on this topic seem to agree that public executions did not demonstrably deter crime; even The Times, which advocated maintaining public executions on the ground that “such death was the due wages of his [a murderer’s] sin,” admits that history demonstrates “that spectacles of public executions have failed in producing the specific effect” of deterring crime (20 Nov. 1949: 4). Executions do quite the opposite, in fact, by hardening the spectators. First, Charles Dickens argues in 1849 that the public display of violent death provides an opportunity for the corrupt to congregate, since “they chiefly attract as spectators the lowest, the most depraved, the most abandoned of mankind, in whom they inspire no wholesome emotions whatever” (Dickens, Times 19 Nov. 1849: 5). Secondly, the display has a “debasing and hardening influence” on the spectators, thus making the already-corrupt masses more degraded (Dickens, Times 19 Nov. 1849: 5). Thirdly, familiarity with death demoralizes, as Dickens warns in his letter to the Daily News, published March 16, 1846: “the study of rude scenes leads to the disregard of human life, and to murder,” for such study leads to familiarity, which in turn generates apathy (Dickens, “Capital Punishment” 148). After frequent repetition, Thackeray explains, “The punishment had grown to be a joke” (“Going to See” 206). Fourthly, far from deterring crime, some argued that public displays of death generated criminal behavior. The spectacle, Mr. Rich explains in defense of his 1841 bill to abolish public executions, “tended to enlist the feelings in the cause of crime” (Times 17 Feb 1841: 3). Dickens and some others argued that witnessing a public hanging further exacerbated an already-ruined moral character, but others claimed that all classes are implicated. While a correspondent of The Times seems to merely extend the notion of depraved and abandoned spectators to the wealthier classes, declaring that such spectacles call out the “moral sewerage of what is called respectable society,” other writers apply no such qualifiers to the gathering of respectable and less respectable classes (“Public Executions” 6). Thackeray notes that “Pickpocket and Peer each is tickled by the sight alike, and has the hidden lust after blood which influences out race,” and a correspondent of The Times similarly notes, “whether we take the ruffians and prostitutes . . . or the better dressed persons . . . [all] seem to be drawn together by the same love of ferocious excitements” (“Going to See” 207; “Public Executions” 6). These spectators are already debased, the leveling agent here being an enjoyment of violent and fatal spectacle innate, according to Thackeray, to the human race. Whether the origins of the execution’s associations with immorality lie in familiarity that leads to demoralization or in the depths of the human character’s inherent bloody tastes, most, if not all, seemed to agree that the public execution always created a spectacle of the worst of human society. iv Chadwick and his witnesses censure the working classes for their blighted and excessive feelings. A great proportion of the witnesses aver that the laboring classes still have feelings, not about their dead but about the appearance of respectability embodied in the pomp and ceremony of “respectful interment.” This concern about respectability, according to Chadwick and his witnesses, is the foremost reason for the retaining the body. They come to the contradictory conclusion that although the family’s familiarity with the corpse engenders the disrespectful treatment of the body, their desire for a respectable funeral remains undiminished. One witness complains of the family’s lack of feeling for the corpse (treating it “‘with as little ceremony as the carcase in a butcher’s shop’”) and excessive feelings about the funeral (“‘Nothing can exceed their desire for an imposing funeral; nothing can surpass their efforts to obtain it’”) (Chadwick, Report 46). Notably, in accounting for the family’s evidently perplexing attitudes, this witness does not 150 attempt to explain why, being thus inured and careless about their dead, these amoral families would still desire a respectable funeral for their dead. v According to the poorhouse master of the Bingley poorhouse in Keighley Union, the custom of allowing the dead to sleep, cordoned off by hanging sheets, in the same room where the living sleep is neither a violation of regional customs nor an abuse of pauper corpses; rather, the master explains in his defense, this mode of laying out the dead “very often occurs in our country, with even respectable people” and adds, “With respectable people, people pretty well off; they have not any other convenience” (Effect of Interment 68). The boundaries of respectability are variable, determined by region and the luxuries each region’s relatively well-off families can afford. In the north, even “people pretty well off” have not the same luxuries of the respectable people in London, whose notions of propriety the select committee’s members represent. vi Surgeons and undertakers all report examples wherein the corpse’s contagion spreads to men, women, and children, yet examples of kissing and “hanging” over the dead body solely feature women. Jeffereys testifies that “‘when the corpse is uncovered, or the coffin is open, females will hang over it’” (Chadwick, Report 39). John Downing, “one of several respectable mechanics” and secretary of a burial club, recounts “‘I have also known a widow who has hung over the body and kissed it, become ill and die through it’” (Chadwick, Report 40). Several other witnesses provide examples of widows equally devoted to their dead husbands and brothers. Examples of men’s closeness to the corpse most often refer to a sick man being forced to share his sick bed with a corpse or his having a coffin right next to the bed. Mr. Leonard, for instance, reports an instance of a coffin’s being “‘within ten inches of the father’s head as he lay upon his pillow’” (Chadwick, Report 33). This misplaced affection, sanitarians and medical men declare, spreads the corpse’s contagion among the living, ultimately killing them. For instance, Jeffereys recalls that “‘A widow who hung over the body of her husband, caught the disease of which he died. . . . A young man died . . . and his body rapidly decomposed. His sister, a fine healthy girl, hung over the corpse and kissed it; in three weeks after she died also” (Chadwick, Report 39). vii As one gravedigger explains, coffin-breaking was a practice of disinterring coffins, breaking the wood and disposing of it, and chopping the body in order to make more room in the burial ground. Breaking a coffin (and the corpse inside it) is acceptable if the body is “in a proper state of decay,” having lost its particularity in its putridity, for as one under undertaker reports, “I like to see a body in a proper state of decay before it is chopped to pieces and exposed to people round about” (Effect of Interment 33). According to this view, once a corpse reaches that “proper state of decay” when form and features blur and the body is no longer recognizable as a particular individual, the body loses some of the respectful privileges accorded to the fresh corpse, such as the right to remain buried. However, when speaking of violations he committed with other gravediggers, one man states that “We have come to bodies quite perfect, and we have cut part away with choppers and pickaxes . . . and the bodies have been so perfect that we could distinguish males from females” (Effect of Interment 130). Those who wish to deny that corpses are disrespectfully treated in this way use language to draw the imagination farther from the “perfect” and “fresh” body. According to one, “The bodies are never disturbed; only, when the decomposition has entirely taken place,” a parish clerk claims that “I have seldom seen anything which could be called a body; nothing but bones” and a rector protests, “there was scarcely any human matter at all in it but dry bones” (Effect of Interment 89, 73). Bones are not bodies; bones are “nothing.” A closer look at gravediggers’ language, however, places doubt on just what is meant by “bones” and questions the idea that “bones” are “nothing” (not bodies). First, not all bones are “dry bones” since gravediggers describe “marrow bones” that are “fresh.” As often as not, coffin breaking threw up “fresh” and “perfect” bodies. “Bones” is a code, a term employed in place of corpse or body. The term “coffin” too is similarly used to conceal the real body being discussed. Most disturbingly, in several places the word “rubbish” functions as such a replacement term. A cart man who during his interview repeatedly refers to having carted “rubbish” out of Enon Chapel eventually clarifies, “I was shooting out the rubbish, I recollect some gentlemen looking at the bones” (Effect of Interment 13). “Rubbish,” then, is really bones. A committee member attempts to ascertain precisely what this man means by rubbish, asking if the rubbish “consisted partly of earth, partly of human 151 bones and partly of coffin?” (Effect of Interment 13, 15). “Yes,” the cart man replies and recounts how he gave some men fixing the street “a few baskets of rubbish . . . and they picked up a human hand . . . it did not appear to have been buried probably a month; it was as perfect as my hand” (Effect of Interment 14). Rubbish, then, is not just “dry bones” or ashes and dust but fresh bodies. Whether the word is “bones” or “rubbish,” language is a tool to conceal the decaying corpse and mitigate the horror of the indecencies enacted upon it. viii Clearly, all agree upon the reasons for the creature’s horror: “‘[N]o mortal could support the horror of the countenance’” (Shelley 61), Victor exclaims in horror, for “‘its unearthly ugliness rendered it almost too horrible for human eyes’” (Shelley 110); Victor’s younger brother calls the creature an “‘Ugly wretch!’” and ‘Hideous monster’” (Shelley 164); Walton declares, “Never did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome yet appalling hideousness” (Shelley 256); finally, the poor monster bemoans, “‘I was . . . endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome’” and “‘My person was hideous’” (Shelley 137, 147). Although the facts of the creature’s tremendously terrible form are consistent from report to report, the cause of the horror is not. Even though Frankenstein recounts, “I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then,” he initially notes that “‘His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful . . . his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness’” (Shelley 62, 60). (Of course too it is quite a mystery as to how Frankenstein created an eight- foot monster out of human body parts.) The creature states, “‘I was not even of the same nature as man,’” and others’ descriptions of him emphasize the distinctly not-human aspects—the stature and inhuman hideousness (Shelley 137). Whatever the reason for the monster’s hideousness, it is not the fact that he made of dead flesh. ix Mrs. Gamp, the nurse that tends to the sick and lays out bodies in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit, desecrates the living body by treating it like a dead one. For her amusement, she conflates the different branches of her work and thus demonstrates her lack of respect for death or the dead body. Caring for a seriously ill man, Mrs. Gamp stares at her charge, “as a connoisseur might gaze upon a doubtful work of art. By degrees, a horrible remembrance of one branch of her calling took possession of the woman; and stooping down, she pinned his wandering arms against his sides, to see how he would look if laid out as a dead man. . . . [H]er fingers itched to compose his limbs in that last marble attitude” (Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit 354). For the morbid hired nurse, caring nothing for her patients, the dead or nearly dead body is an amusement. The corpse is not a sad sight but a piece of art. It is unimaginable that a family member or friend would thus prematurely lay out a loved one’s sick or dying body and exclaim, as Gamp does, “‘Ah! . . . he’d make a lovely corpse!’” (Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit 354). x In Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Harry Carson is very much a loved dead body, his family sincerely mourns him, and yet his corpse is twice nearly mistaken for tea. Harry’s mother and sisters, self-indulgent and idle, wait impatiently for tea time. No longer willing to wait in boredom, “the more energetic Sophy, pulling the bell with some determination” demands of their housekeeper, “‘Tea, directly, Parker’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 203). Instead of tea, Parker serves Mrs. Carson and her daughters news of their beloved Harry Carson’s violent death. In a subsequent scene, Carson’s father too finds himself served news of his son’s death rather than the tea he expected. Intending to tell Mr. Carson of his son’s death, Sophy must call him twice before he starts from his nap, the first words he utters being, “‘Tea is ready, is it?’” (Gaskell, Mary Barton 206). Harry is not for tea, but his body is laid out upon the servants’ dining table, only later being moved up to his bedroom. It may be unusual for the middle classes to lay their dead upon dining tables, but according to Chadwick’s interviewees in his Practice of Interment in Towns, working class survivors customarily placed the corpse on the table. Carson was not always a factory-owner, however, having been a factory worker. Harry Carson’s body laid out, even temporarily, on the servants’ dining table reveals a trace of Mr. Carson’s status at a previous member of the working class. xi This is not the first association of Miss Havisham with cannibalism. Miss Havisham asks young Pip, touching her heart, “‘Do you know what I touch here?’” which Pip confesses to the reader, “made me think of the young man” (Dickens, Great Expectations 93). In the novel’s first scene, ensuring that Pip will 152 return to him with the requisite file and wittles, Magwitch first urges the boy to “‘bring ‘em both to me. . . . Or I’ll have your heart and liver out’” (Dickens, Great Expectations 42). To be certain of the terrorized boy’s obedience, Magwitch invents a story of a terrible companion, “‘a young man hid with me . . . [who] has a secret way pecooliar to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver’” (Dickens, Great Expectations 42). Associating Havisham with the fictitious young man who gets at boy’s hearts, also associated with Magwitch, who threatens Pip with such an evisceration if left without food, implies a cannibalistic threat. Pip’s association is, however, ambiguous: he could fear that Havisham would tear out (and eat) his own heart or tear out her own heart and feast upon that. It is soon evident that Miss Havisham intends to become the object feasted upon. xii The fire that kills Havisham punishes and, in a sense, purifies her after her confession to Pip about her treatment of Estella (“‘I stole her heart away and put ice in its place’”) and her declared repentance for her treatment of Pip. The fire burns away that bridal dress (the emblem of her self in its decay), leaving only “patches of tinder yet alight;” even her rotted bride cake is destroyed when Pip uses the tablecloth to dampen the fire, “and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst and all the ugly things that sheltered there,” thereby obliterating another emblem of her decay and gnawing resentment (Dickens, Great Expectations 425). Nevertheless, the destruction is not sufficient to create her anew. Pip reports that “Though every vestige of her dress was burnt . . . she still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that had been and was changed, was still upon her” (Dickens, Great Expectations 425). Not yet dead but certainly dying, in this approximation of her bridal array—now at least white again rather than decayed yellow—Pip reports that “she lay indeed where I had seen her strike her stick, and had heard her say that she would lie one day,” the surgeon having ordered her bed carried down and placed upon the table (Dickens, Great Expectations 425). Miss Havisham is a spectacle in life and intended to make herself such after death while still spiteful and angry. After her spite turns to regret, she still must lay her body in her dying days upon the horrible bridal feast table. 153 Chapter Three The Corpse Market’s Narrative Feedback Loop: The Tale of the Thing, the Dissecting Explorer-Detective, the Resurrectionist, and the Law The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical man was a fierce and relentless explorer of truth, a man who bravely and assiduously did what was necessary to advance his profession in spite of judges who deemed his corpse-related activities illegal and contra bonos mores, a slothful Parliament that refused to grant him necessary supplies and protections, and the ignorant and sometimes violent protests of the populace. The people threatened him with bodily injury, even death, because their outdated sentiments about the dead caused them to resent the slicing and destruction of the corpse’s senseless matter. The law threatened him because he sought knowledge by illegally procuring dead bodies and yet punished him if he did not learn well the keystone of his profession— anatomy—gained only through dissection. And still he dissected. Only by dissecting could he uncover, describe, categorize, and demystify the functions and malfunctions of the human form as well as develop progressively better means to alleviate, even cure, those malfunctions. Without his work in the face of bodily and legal punishment, we would today not survive amputations; no one knowing how to tie an artery, we would bleed to death on operating tables; corporeal malfunctions being a puzzle, we would have no relief from hernias and aneurisms; and surgery in general would be an ignorant hack- job in which the operator would be as likely to remove your kidney as your gall bladder. Now imagine that you have just buried your young daughter who died after the grand doctors at the hospital were unable to diagnose, much less treat, her disease. 154 Because you are poor, earning only seven shillings a week, you must bury her in a small London burial ground without the protections of a brick-lined grave, a brick vault, triple coffins, an iron coffin, or a mortsafe (an open-bottomed iron cage sunk about a foot or more into the ground above the coffin, which supposedly warded off resurrectionists but which they evidently dug around quite easily). The next evening, a group of four filthy, foul-mouthed, gin-sodden men enter through the graveyard gate, which has been left unlocked by the watchman whom they had bribed. Staggering slightly, they approach your child’s grave. They dig down to the head of the coffin, use a lever or hook to crack the coffin lid at about one-third the way down, and draw up the body using a rope slung around the neck or under the arms. This takes about fifteen minutes. In order to avoid being prosecuted on grave-robbing charges, they strip your poor child’s body and toss the clothes and shroud back into the grave. After all, while it is not a crime to steal a dead body, it is a crime to steal grave-clothes. Next, they shove her into a coarse sack and carry her off in a cart to trade at the hospital or anatomy school for guineas, which they then will squander on more gin and other sensual enjoyments. Later that evening, the same group breaks into a house, steals some plate, and carries it away in the same cart that earlier carried your child’s body. Today, your spouse, your sibling, or your child may apply to medical school or pursue studies in a number of professions that survived or grew out of the nineteenth century. There are still surgeons, anatomy teachers, coroners, and undertakers. From these nineteenth-century professions emerged specialized medical researchers, medical museum curators, funeral directors, mortuary technicians, forensic pathologists, and forensic anthropologists. There are college programs for careers in funeral services, 155 mortuary science, and forensic science. There is no trade school for body-snatching. There are no ads seeking applicants for an empty resurrection-man position at a nearby medical school. Although stealing and selling bodies and parts still occurs, the resurrectionist’s profession no longer exists. i The practice of medicine and surgery developed into a highly esteemed profession; the resurrectionist became extinct. This is a story about parallel professions, tangled together, one sanitized and one demonized. In the dual narratives of the medical man and resurrectionist, the corpse’s story emerges as an economic one: the medical men who required bodies and the body- snatchers who provided them. The dead body played a progressively crucial part in the medical man’s professional and individual narrative as a result of changes in medical theory and the law. Upon the corpse depended the narrative of progressive medicine actuated and maintained by the medical researcher who excised diseased flesh with his corpse-practiced knife and who selflessly enlightened his fellow practitioners with publications on his dissection-based discoveries. The corpse also educated the student and maintained and augmented the practitioner’s knowledge, without which the medical man was liable to civil lawsuits. The medical man’s livelihood depended upon an abundant supply of dead bodies. From this dependency arose a second profession, the resurrectionist whose livelihood also depended upon the dead body. Only one profession—the medical man’s—survived to tell its story. ii Successful cultural narratives do not often emerge without swallowing or smothering other narratives. The great story of the medical profession’s hard-won rise to greatness and power is a cleaned-up story; sanitization required a displacement of the dissector’s dirt onto the body-snatcher. Medical men and their chroniclers, for instance, disseminated the 156 notion of body-snatchers as criminal men who thieved under the cover of their business and burked their subjects with impunity. (Burking, the method the infamous William Hare and William Burke used to murder the people they sold to the unfortunate anatomist Robert Knox, involved smothering the victims. Hare and Burke were murderers but never body-snatchers.) Parliament was responsible for the resurrectionist’s extinction when it implemented the 1832 Anatomy Act that offered a larger, albeit still insufficient, legal supply of subjects, thereby rendering the body-snatcher superfluous; it was the medical man who smothered the body-snatcher’s professional tale with one of criminality in the endeavor to project all contamination of the body-snatching trade onto the seller. The law played a central role in creating and disaggregating both professions as well as shaping the dueling stories. Rendering corpses both necessary and illegal, the law created and punished the corpse trade. Judges since the eighteenth century had been delineating the corpse’s protections under the law; they declared the corpse not property, which precluded a legal market for buying and selling bodies, and judged non-interment of bodies for any reason contra bonos mores. At the same time, as tort law began to develop and displace contract law in medical lawsuits, medical men were held to a duty of care, or an expected standard of knowledge and skill. If a practitioner neglected fully to learn his profession, which included the structure and function of the human body, he was vulnerable to lawsuits on the basis of ignorance or unskillfulness instead of simply neglecting to fulfill his contract with a patient. The law required dissection, the only means truly to learn anatomy at the time, and yet severely curtailed corpse supply and forbad the buying or selling of dead bodies. Out of this legal morass arose the black market in corpses. Professing to protect the corpse and maintain order by punishing those 157 who transgressed good morals by doing something with the body other than burying it, the law should have disciplined both professions. It did not. Although the anatomists ordered the bodies, it was primarily the working-class procurers who were punished. As so often is the case with the corpse, its story is bound to notions of class. The law’s involvement with the corpse-as-property began in the seventeenth century. Initially, the law’s interest lay not in the corpse as property but the corpse’s capacity to own property. The first case involving property and corpses is Haynes’s Case tried at the 1614 Lent Assize in Leicester. William Haynes, who disinterred the bodies of four people, appropriated the winding sheets, and re-interred the corpses, did not steal from the corpses because “a dead body, being but a lump of earth, has no capacity” to own anything (“Haynes’ Case” 612). A similar case (1617) is reported in Michael Dalton’s mid-seventeenth-century The Country Justice (1648), but while Haynes was indicted for a felony and whipped, this man who stole winding sheet was indicted on a misdemeanor. This irregularity in categorization and punishment foreshadows the law’s inconsistency through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when it comes to the subject of corpses and property. Case law established the corpse’s inability to own property; law commentary established the corpse’s inability to be property. A corpse is nullius in bonis, the property of no one. Not being property, the corpse cannot be a commodity. When referring to the emergence of the no-property rule, law commentators cite Cokes’s division between ecclesiastical and common law jurisdiction in his Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (1644). Interment involves two elements—the monument and the body it represents. Each element is under the protection of a different set of laws: “The buriall of 158 the Cadaver (that is caro data vermibus [“flesh given to worms”] is nullius in bonis, and belongs to Ecclesiastical cognizance, but as to the monument, action is given . . . at the Common Law for defacing thereof” (Coke 203). This is not the place to weigh the validity of the no-property rule, which several writers on law history and modern law have already done. iii What matters here is that nineteenth-century law commentators and those who decided case law accepted this interpretation and its reasoning as the origin of the no-property rule that precluded the body’s status as commodity. The law forbad commodification of the corpse but balanced the interdict by allotting medical men, through the Company of Barber-Surgeons, a small annual supply of dead bodies. Until the 1832 Anatomy Act, which deemed “unclaimed” bodies (the poor whose families could not afford to claim and bury them or those lacking or separated from their friends and family) fodder for the surgeon’s knife, the only legal supply of bodies was granted by Royal Charter and Acts of Parliament. The 1540 Act Hen. VIII xii, c. 12, arranged for the appropriation of four bodies a year to the Corporation of Surgeons and Barbers, and Charles II granted six more bodies. From establishment of the Company of Barber-Surgeons in 1540 until its dissolution in 1745, that institution maintained exclusive rights to dissection—amounting to four and later six annual public anatomies, although the full allotted number of anatomies did not occur every year—and prosecuted those who impinged on those rights as late as 1714. Undoubtedly such tight controls over legal anatomy made it difficult to establish private anatomy schools, and the annual public anatomies were vastly insufficient in number to educate medical students or promote medical endeavors to probe and uncover the secrets of the human body. In short, the Corporation hampered its own medical researchers and 159 teachers. iv Not surprisingly, as the Company’s power waned, progress in medical education and research waxed. In 1745, the Company of Barber-Surgeons was dissolved, and for a few years thereafter, the Masters, Governors, and Commonality of the Art and Science of Surgery was in disarray, unable to police its members’ dissecting activities. The following year, 1746, William Hunter opened his Windmill-Street school that, unlike most other schools then established, promised in its advertisements to teach anatomy in the “Paris manner,” which meant that each student would have a body to dissect. While this was not strictly true of all of the Parisian medical education facilities at the time, when Hunter studied in Paris 1743-44, “opportunities for student dissection existed in the major hospitals . . . and in private courses,” which was not true of London (Gelfand 121). William Hunter was not the first man to open a private school in London, but nineteenth- century medical men and modern medical historians alike attribute “The reformation of this antiquated and imperfect system” of medical education to his establishing the Windmill-Street school (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 4). Before William Hunter’s school, John Hunter’s recent biographer Wendy Moore writes, “would- be physicians spent years at universities pouring over ancient texts and aspiring surgeons blithely copied the errors of their tutors during long apprenticeships, [and] the study of the human body remained a backwater of medical education” (25). Hunter’s work in revising medical education was but one manifestation of a larger and long-developing shift in medical theory that began with an ever-increasing interest in the body’s physical structure, physiological function, and relations among systems and between structure and function. 160 In this shift may be traced the development of the medical man’s narrativized self-characterization as the scientifically minded, intrepid explorer of corporeal mysteries. In his posthumously published Two Introductory Lectures (1784), William Hunter writes that the structure of an animal body, is hitherto so imperfectly understood, the machinery so infinite, the parts so delicate, and their relations to, and influence upon one another so incomprehensible, that . . . the demonstrator, as well as the student, should look upon himself in the true and humble light of an enquirer, and follow the method of investigation. (82-83) The body is an unknown, a fragile container of infinite mysteries. The man of medicine must become an explorer who finds “the analytic method . . . most fit, in the enquires which we undertake, with the view of making discoveries” (Hunter 82). Hunter’s emphasis upon discovery and his stance on dissection’s indispensability in medical education was part of a larger movement in medical theory, research, and education occurring in the second half of the eighteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, Russell Maulitz writes in Morbid Appearances: The Anatomy of Pathology in the Early Nineteenth Century (1987), medical men began to step away from the misapprehensions of Galen and displace his humoral theory of diseases—as well as the perplexing and badly grounded theories of other long-dead medical men—with “an essentially surgical impulse to situate morbid appearances in the palpable, solid parts of the body” (18). Medical men became empirical researchers rather than depending upon the inaccurate theorizing of physicians from past eras. The medical endeavor became one of discovery and its adherents detectives. 161 Asserting that exploration of dead flesh engendered knowledge, medical men offered a progressive narrative from the dark ages of medicine to an enlightened present of dissection and discovery under the guidance of the medical detective. It was he, the man of science, who acted as the catalyst for this revolution in medicine. The dead body was indispensable to the spinning out of this narrative, for it was the material with which dissector fought against old medical prejudices and in so doing fought for his patient’s life. As Southwood Smith would later write, “There is not a medical prejudice which has not slain its thousands, nor a false theory which has not immolated its tens of thousands” (Use of the Dead to the Living 29). Thus, the new medical man created a split between himself (the intrepid researcher) and the old-fashioned medical man who was bound to his outdated tomes filled with dangerously bad knowledge. Seeking out the appearances, development, and origin of diseases and later how localized diseases spread their poisonous influence to other organs or organ systems, surgeons turned away from the tome and concentrated upon the new book of medical knowledge—the corpse. The notion of the indispensability of dissection to the medical endeavor had been gaining widespread support only through the mid- to late-eighteenth century. By the 1810s, medical students could be “plucked” (failed) at their medical examination for lacking requisite knowledge of anatomy. Eventually, a medical men could reasonably declare that “[t]he most important diseases have their seat in the organs of the body” rather than the humors (Smith, Use of the Dead to the Living 6). The explorer also discovered that “[t]he seat of pain is often at a great distance from that of the affected organ. In disease of the liver, pain is generally felt at the top of the right shoulder . . . [and] nothing but anatomy could teach” such strange connections in the human body (Smith, Use of the Dead to the 162 Living 7). The study of anatomy allowed the medical man to develop ways to tie arteries, operate on aneurisms and strangulated hernias, stop hemorrhages, amputate limbs, and track down the origins of misplaced pains. New surgeries were developed while the number of surgeries was cut down. According to Astley Cooper, in 1828 one operation is used where thirty years earlier three would be requisite (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 14). Corpses are knowledge. Exposing bad medical theories and offering new and better knowledge, dead bodies held for the insightful seeker the means to advance science and to better protect the common weal. The medical man’s narrative is thus written at the expense of the dead body. Medical men did not just use the scientific knowledge wrested from bits of dead flesh to enlighten their students and themselves; such knowledge also formed the foundation of reputation and wealth in addition to establishing individual narratives of the explorer-man of science that contributed to the larger narrative of medical investigation. Accordingly, medical men fought publicly over the rights to pin their names to new knowledge. Espionage and thievery of intellectual property and actual property (medical preparations) were not unusual, it seems. After seeing John Hunter’s preparations on congenital hernias, Percivall Pott announced his intent to publish a treatise on the subject in 1757. When confronted, Pott denied having seen the preparations even though two students witnessed his visit (Moore). During the same time period, Alexander Monro II twice published work, for which he claimed precedent, that John and William Hunter had already conducted and recorded but not published (Moore). John Hunter accused his brother William, not unjustly, of using his preparations in producing his papers on medical discoveries but without acknowledging the source of his knowledge. John 163 Hunter’s brother-in-law and executor Sir Everard Home published papers based upon Hunter’s own research and then in 1823 burned most of the manuscripts, which had never been copied, to conceal his crime. Instances of such thievery and public accusations continued on into the nineteenth century, addressing discoveries from what salmon consumed to claims about the structure of the eye, theories about humans and animals, and claims about gross anatomy, minute anatomy, and physiology. With publication came fame, when the work was good and particularly when it established a precedent. Fame brought more well-paying clients, appointments, honorary positions, and sometimes even royal favor. These activities, of course, do not often emerge in the narrative of the medical researcher’s rise to respectability and power, and yet it can be argued that such professional thievery and bitter fights over intellectual property rights, which continue among medical circles in the present time, constitute an unsavory but inevitable aspect of professional development. Development of case law on the corpse-as-property coincided with the rise of the corpse’s importance in medical research and education. The medical man helped write the law’s story on corpse protection by triggering the law’s response to illegal corpse procurement, and the law helped write the medical man’s story by defining his access to corpses and tying theft for the purposes of dissection (and thus the medical endeavor) to immorality. If the law’s first concern with the corpse and property in the seventeenth century is with the grave-clothes rather than the corpse itself, then it seems that corpse- theft was not yet a significant issue, at least not until the mid-eighteenth century. It was not until nearly one hundred years after Coke’s commentary that corpse-theft emerged in the courts: in 1732, John Loftas was imprisoned for removing and carrying away the fat 164 from a dead body, and in 1747, James Thomas and Charles Pretty were fined one shilling for disinterring and taking the corpse of two-year-old John Race (Gentlemen’s Magazine 591). Neither case appears to be connected specifically to the medical endeavor (the reasons for the thefts were not recorded), nor did they excite much commentary in law tomes. Exelby v. Handyside (1749), involving a medical practitioner, occasioned the first law commentaries on the no-property rule since Coke’s initial interpretation and set a precedent of inconsistency seen in later trials on criminal offences relating to corpses. A trover, an action seeking to recover the value of goods misappropriated by another person, was brought against Dr. Handyside for taking the body of a woman’s infant Siamese twins. The judge Lord C. J. Willes delineated two elements of the no-property rule. First, Willes “held that action would not lie, as no person had any property in corpses” (East 652). Secondly, “stealing it [the corpse] is no felony, but a very high misdemeanour” (East 652). Although the corpse was not property, and so technically could not be stolen, “stealing” a dead body is still an indictable offense. Here surfaces a primary contradiction in the law framing property and corpses. Furthermore, the action did not lie in this case but would in later cases against those who steal what is not property, thus continuing the inconsistency in punishment signaled in the seventeenth- century grave-clothes-theft cases. Finally, this case demonstrates the feedback system between the law and the medical profession. The medical man’s action compels the law to cobble together a story of the corpse and the medical man; the telling of this story shapes the medical story’s future path. Without the medical man’s theft, there would be no corpse story to relate in the courts; without the law’s interpretation of the corpse and 165 the medical man, there would be no ruling to define and delimit what the body is (not property) and what can or cannot be done with the body. Case law involving corpse-theft shapes and merges stories of the corpse-as-victim and dissector-as-perpetrator by narrating the corpse’s vulnerability and a connection between medicine and actions contra bonos mores. This story is an ambiguous, contradictory, and inconsistent one. One case rules on the basis of the corpse’s not being property (Handyside), one upon the violation of interment rules (Rex v. Young), and the last upon the basis that disinterment violates decency (Rex v. Lynn). Neither Handyside nor Rex v. Young (1780) indicted or convicted for corpse-theft. In Rex v. Young, three people, including a workhouse master and a surgeon who took a Shoreditch workhouse pauper’s corpse to a dissecting-room instead of burying it, were convicted of conspiracy to prevent burial (“The King against Lynn” 395). Although this case involves body- snatching, the indictment rests upon the violation of interment rules. Setting the precedent for prosecuting body-snatching as an instance of bad morals, Rex v. Lynn (1788) established corpse-theft as an offence in common law and demonstrates the law’s confusion on how to indict and convict persons for stealing something that is not property. Citing law, commentators Hale, Hawkins, and Stamford, whose silence “upon this subject is a very strong argument to shew that there is not any such offence cognizable in Criminal Courts,” Serjeant-at-law Bond moved that the criminal court had no jurisdiction over the case and argued, citing Coke, that “if it be any crime, it is of ecclesiastical cognizance,” and finally that the supposed crime “is not made penal by any statute” (“The King against Lynn” 394). Nor could the defendant be prosecuted on the basis “of taking up dead bodies for any indecent exhibitions” since dissection was not 166 here considered an “indecent exhibition,” even though it was the occasion for the disinterment (“The King against Lynn” 394). The court responded “that common decency required that the practice should be put a stop to” and declared the case under the jurisdiction of the criminal court “as being highly indecent and contra bonos mores; at the bare idea alone of which nature revolted” (“The King against Lynn” 395). Refusing “even to grant a rule to shew cause,” the court made body-snatching a crime on the basis that digging up bodies, even for the purposes of dissection, was an affront to common decency (“The King against Lynn” 395). This is a case of morals, not thievery. The procurer may not be a thief, but his actions are immoral. Moreover, if dissection is the occasion for disinterment, which revolting practice is against “common decency” and good morals, then it can be argued that by association dissection is contra bonos mores. As case law developed the no-property rule, it continued to connect medicine more explicitly with criminality and immorality and countered the medical man’s narrative of dissection’s role in guaranteeing public welfare. The Handyside case and Rex v. Young associate medicine with the misappropriation of the dead body. Rex v. Lynn further associates medicine and dissection with indecency and crime. The judge in Rex v. Lynn states “nature revolted” at disinterment and “[t]hat the purpose of taking up the body for dissection did not make it less an indictable offence” (“The King against Lynn” 395). There is no validating higher purpose in anatomizing a dead body, the court implies. The 1822 case Rex v. Cundick further develops the trends evident in Rex v. Lynn: it ruled that not interring a body is against good morals and points to dissection as an evil. Like Rex v. Young, this is a case of the corpse-possessor’s not performing his legal duty to inter it. Cundick, a contracted undertaker for Horse-monger gaol, was ordered to bury 167 the body of an executed man. Instead, Cundick sold the corpse to Joshua Brookes, at whose school the body was identified. The judge convicted Cundick on the following basis—“To sell the dead body of a capital convict, for dissection, where dissection is no part of the sentence, is a misdemeanor indictable at common law” (“The King v. Cundick” 900). The judgment is clear on the moral implications of such a failure of duty. Four times it applies the word “‘wicked’” to the “‘evil-disposed person’” Cundick. More importantly, the ruling also strongly suggests that it is not just the misappropriation that is shocking to public decency: it is what is done with the body. The undertaker “‘did sell and dispose of the same for the purpose of being dissected, cut in pieces, mangled, and destroyed’” (“The King v. Cundick” 900). Dissection lacks positive value in this case; it is an agent not of scientific discovery and a means to better public health but one of desecration. To sell a body for dissection is to act “‘to the great scandal and disgrace of religion, decency and morality, in contempt of our said Lord the King and his laws’” (“The King v. Cundick” 900). The court’s fierce condemnation seems to refer to misappropriation and dissection. Here case law establishes a principle, London magistrate Twyford declares in 1828, “that it is contra bonos mores, and hurtful to the interests of the public, as being contrary to their moral feelings to treat dead bodies as subjects of any thing but funeral rites and interment” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 98). The medical researcher and educator, investigating the dead body with scalpel in hand, do not work to save the public. They offend key principles of social conduct. Disinterment for the purposes of dissection violated good morals, but neglecting to learn the body’s structure and function and then maintain that knowledge violated 168 patients’ rights. Property law denied the medical man access to the dead body; civil law required access. The narratives of law and medicine again intertwine here, the former’s story of the maintenance of social order contributing to the latter’s narrative of professional development. The development of tort law involved the story of medical responsibility and an ever-shifting standard of care. That is, tort law contributed to the corpse’s importance in medical education and to the practicing medical man’s reputation, livelihood, and legal standing by requiring practitioners to obtain and maintain a certain level of knowledge and skill. Before the rise of tort in the early nineteenth century, instances of medical malpractice would have fallen under contract law or assumpsit, action to recover damages on the basis of unfulfilled promises made in a contract, be they written, oral, or implied in the law. Until the eighteenth century, cure-contracts, in which payment was to be delivered upon cure of the disease or disorder for which the medical man entered into contract with the patient, framed many medical transactions. “Medical litigation,” historian Catherine Crawford writes, “was thus largely a matter of enforcing contracts” (383). During the Enlightenment, such contracts faded as medical practitioners sought to raise the medical profession above that of the quack and empiric healer, and such contracts were “potentially troublesome to a practitioner from a financial and legal point of view . . . [and] was also coming to be thought unseemly and inappropriate to offer promises and warranties like an advertising empiric” (Crawford 392). In medical practice, the movement away from cure-contracts was part of a movement towards respectability. 169 Further contributing to the disappearance of contract law in medicine was the movement from contract law to tort law. By the late eighteenth century, liability lawsuits involving employment or responsibilities under contract could be framed by contract or tort. This was particularly true for professionals engaged in common callings, who were liable for not only breach of contractual obligations but also negligence through misfeasance, malfeasance, or nonfeasance (Winfield). Equally crucial to this development in law theory was the idea of greater rights for English citizens. The foremost right of English people, William Blackstone declares in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), is the right of “personal security [which] consists in a person’s legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation” (1: 128). Medicine can cure or seriously injure an individual’s limbs, body, and health, possibly resulting in a better enjoyment of life or an untimely death. Accordingly, “the neglect or unskilful management of his physician, surgeon, or apothecary” represents a violation of a British citizen’s right to “personal security” (Blackstone: 3 121). Such violations of individuals’ rights are actionable, For it has been solemnly resolved, that mala praxis is a great misdemeanor and offence at common law, whether it be for curiosity and experiment, or by neglect; because it breaks the trust which the party had placed in his physician, and tends to the patient’s destruction. (Blackstone 3: 121) Blackstone argues that because such cases do not involve force, they fall under the jurisdiction of trespass on the case, which acts as “an universal remedy given for all personal wrongs and injuries without force” because it is designed to protect a plaintiff’s rights rather than property or body (Blackstone: 3 123). Furthermore, while action on the case could be brought for indirect injuries, trespass on the case applied to injuries directly 170 resulting from the defendant’s action. Therefore, trespass was more fitting for cases involving medical practitioners’ actions on plaintiff’s bodies. Trespass upon the case became an appropriate action for medical malpractice cases also because as it developed into tort it encompassed a wide range of potential bases for litigation and so could address breach of contract issues and personal rights. Medical lawsuits could address malpractice, including breach of care or expected levels of skill, rather than merely failure to perform as contracted, so damages could be brought for unintentional or indirect injuries rather than intentional injury. Though not settled until the first few decades of the nineteenth century, by the late eighteenth century, actions could lie in tort for negligence in the performance of an undertaking regardless of existing claims in contract (Prichard). Like others engaged in professional employment, surgeons were expected to possess a certain degree of skill, a degree which the bylaws of the Royal College of Surgeons seemed to promise. v The first case of medical negligence, Slater v. Baker and Stapleton (1767), was decided in favor of the plaintiff because the surgeon Baker and apothecary Stapleton acted contrary to “the usage and law of surgeons; then it was ignorance and unskilfulness in that very particular, to do contrary to the rule of the profession, what no surgeon ought to have done” (“Slater v. Baker and Stapleton” 862). Similarly, in Seare v. Prentice (1807), the judge instructs the jury that “if the defendant had proceeded without any regard of the common ordinary rules of his profession,” then the surgeon was guilty of unskillfulness. This is not to imply that there was a stable, agreed-upon understanding of the necessary skills a surgeon must possess. The “learned judge” in Seare v. Prentice admits “that he was at a loss to state to the jury what degree 171 of skill ought to be required of a village surgeon” (Paris 196). Nevertheless, a muddy understanding of what a surgeon is expected to know and be able to perform emerges when compared to the behaviors and doings of other surgeons. In his comments upon this case, Chief Judge Lord Ellenborough, reasons, “an ordinary degree of skill is necessary for a surgeon . . . in the same manner as it is necessary for every other man to have it in the course of his employment” (Paris 197). Seeking to establish some sort of framework for judging a surgeon’s skill or lack thereof, Theodric Beck, author of the 1821 treatise The Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, asserts that it is “the duty of the surgeon to acquaint himself with the most approved modes of modern practice—to apply them to the symptoms presented to his view” (327). Summarizing this trend, Francis Hilliard in The Law of Torts or Private Wrongs (1861) writes, “The implied contract of a surgeon is not to cure, but to possess and employ, in the treatment of a case, such reasonable skill and diligence as are ordinarily exercised in his profession, by thoroughly educated surgeons” (254). Still, he explains, a “surgeon is responsible only for ordinary or reasonable care and skill, and the exercise of his best judgment in matters of doubt; not for a want of the highest degree of skill” (Hilliard 253). Surgeons cannot be held to the highest standard of care; nevertheless, they are expected to keep up with developments in surgical practice. A country surgeon who does not keep himself up to date can be sued for negligence and ignorance. Post-diploma education, therefore, is a significant factor weighed in whether or not a surgeon has violated the contract or failed to adhere to the “duty of care” and might therefore be liable for any wrongs done to the patient. The tale of tort law belies the notion that medical men worked solely in the interests of knowledge and human welfare. They also dissected because the law forced 172 them to do so, lest they be sued for malpractice. Civil law thus required not only that the medical student learn well the human body but also that the medical practitioner continually educate himself. He needed dead flesh in order to renew his familiarity with the body, practice operations, and remain up to date on new modes of operation. Practicing upon the dead was not the duty of students only, but necessary for the practitioner as well because both inexperience and outdated or faded knowledge could become a liability. Southwood Smith asserts in at least two articles and the 1828 Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy, “It is essential also to the practitioner, that during the whole course of his professional career he should dissect, in order to keep up his stock of knowledge, and to practise frequently on the dead subject” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 8). This is requisite, he reports, not only for surgeons but “to the general practitioner, who occupies the lowest rank in the profession, and to the physician who occupies the highest” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 85). Similarly, Astley Cooper argues that “whenever subjects can be obtained for the purpose, it is considered that it is his duty to perform . . . upon the dead body,” and while the “duty” to dissect facilitated medical education and research, such knowledge protected the medical practitioner against law suits (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 15). Finally, because of his dependency upon dissection, surgeons had the most to fear from civil lawsuits, more so than apothecaries and physicians. Surgery, unlike medicine, was “more concrete, localized, and external” and consequently, “[e]rrors in surgical diagnosis . . . and bodily harm could be linked more unambiguously to particular therapeutic intervention” (Crawford 403). The nature of surgical intervention, in contrast 173 to the use of physic, which in general left no external mark, rendered surgeons more vulnerable to lawsuits. Medical men needed bodies—lots of them—in order to maintain and build upon their dauntless dissector-explorer narrative and protect themselves from malpractice. However, both the law and the Company of Surgeons stood in the great medical explorer’s way. Parliament granted the Company a significantly larger number of bodies per year (compared to six annually) with 1752 with the “Act for better preventing the horrid Crime of Murder” (Act 25 Geo. II, c. 37). As “some further terror and peculiar mark of infamy” to deter murderers, the Act granted the Royal College of Surgeons the right to appropriate for dissection the bodies of murderers executed in Middlesex and London in addition to making it a felony to “rescue” those corpses at the scaffold (not an infrequent occurrence). In 1823, referring to the 1752 Murder Act, the prosecution for a body-snatching case “contended that the legislature had sufficiently provided for the necessity of the case by appropriating annually a sufficient number of the dead bodies of criminals” (Times 1 Feb. 1823: 3). Very few, if any, who advocated the dissection of at least one body per student per year really believed that the law offered appropriate provisions. A glance at the returns listing the executions for London and Middlesex between 1752 and 1830 clearly indicates just how inadequate the law’s provisions were, particularly as executions declined during the nineteenth century. Between 1752 and 1800, an average of 31.8 executions occurred each year in London and Middlesex, with a high of 97 in 1785 and a low of 6 in 1759. Between 1800 and 1817, the number of executions in Middlesex and London varied between a low of 5 and a high of 29, with an average of 14 executions a year, merely half the executions that occurred during the first 174 forty-eight years of the Act’s existence (Abstract of Number of Persons). The executions in London and Middlesex between 1818 and 1830 show a slight increase with the average of 21.1 executions per year (Return of Number of Persons). Not all these bodies made it to the dissector’s slab. Only those murderers whose judges made dissection part of their death sentences could be dissected, so not all executed bodies were slated as things for the surgeon. Not all bodies scheduled for execution were destined to lie on the dissector’s slab, for some bodies were “rescued” by family, friends, or the public. In the eighteenth century, the legally allotted supply was most likely deficient for Company members and off-limits to non-members. The number of schools that dissected and dissecting students in those schools being unavailable, it is difficult to determine to what extent this supply served those associated with the Company. What is not in doubt is that these bodies were under the Company’s control. Private teachers and researchers such as William Hunter who, not being members, were unaffiliated with the Company would have no right to that supply and would have been forced to seek their subjects elsewhere. By the second decade of the nineteenth century, it was quite obvious that legal supply accessible by members had become utterly and absurdly insufficient for educational or research purposes. The legal supply would not have satisfied the requirements of medical education in London even during the first decade of the nineteenth century when there were but 200 medical students. By 1823, when the average number of legal subjects amounted to 21.1 bodies per year, there were 1,000 medical students in London. The number dropped to 800 five years later, which many medical lecturers asserted was a consequence of the dearth of subjects that drove students to France where the unclaimed of Paris’s public charity institutions, such as hospitals, 175 provided more abundant supply (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy; Lonsdale). Averaging the numbers proffered by witnesses at the 1828 Parliamentary investigation of the corpse-supply problem (which did not include the supply needed for post-diploma research and practice), the Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy declares that during their sixteen-month education, students should have “not less than three [bodies]; two being required for learning the structure of the parts of the body, and one the mode of operating” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 4). This is far from Granville Pattison’s recommended twelve subjects per education, and yet the Report calculates that London offers “less than one subject for each dissecting student; a proportion wholly insufficient for the purposes of complete education” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 4). Supply was dire. An 1827 return from London hospital and private schools, of which there were twelve, lists in all 701 students at dissecting rooms and 597 students who actually dissected 595 bodies (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 138). Over one hundred students did not dissect (although it is not clear if these students merely were registered and then failed to attend the course) and those who did had less than one body per student. When broken down by school, the numbers are even worse. The best subject-to-student ratio was at London Hospital at 40 students to 42 subjects and the worst at Chapel-street private anatomy school’s 45 students to 15 subjects, but even the powerful hospital schools did not always obtain an even ratio. Guy’s Hospital offered 151 students 80 subjects, and St. Thomas’s offered 121 students 70 bodies (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 138). The legal supplies were woefully short of providing even the sorry numbers here reported, and these numbers do not take into account the bodies that anatomists and surgeons required 176 for their experiments, practice, and teaching endeavors. Comparing such numbers to the returns of executed murderers in London and Middlesex, it is obvious that the supplies originated from illegal sources. vi Originally, practitioners and researchers, their assistants, and students were in the business of body-snatching for themselves. Biographer Wendy Moore deems it “most probable” that John Hunter, great eighteen-century surgeon and younger brother of William Hunter, personally headed resurrecting campaigns. “John Hunter would dissect more bodies, and therefore require more bodies stolen from graves, than any other anatomist of the eighteenth century,” Moore claims and goes on to state that he “would help transform it [body-snatching] into an industry” and “would develop closer relationships with the grave robbers than any other surgeon” (a claim others have also made of eminent nineteenth-century surgeon and dissector Sir Astley Cooper) (37). During the last half of the eighteenth century, eminent surgeons resurrected subjects, at times with great gusto, according to their historians. Robert Liston was famous for his nighttime ventures while Sir Charles Bell also was known to participate in graveyard adventures. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians of body-snatching and biographers of medical men proudly recount stories of surgeons’ daring exploits in the endeavor to procure certain monstrous bodies or body parts. Two often-described stories are John Hunter’s exertions to procure the Irish giant’s body—a “criminal but commendable act of a honoured member of the medical profession,” twentieth-century historian James Moores Ball writes—and Sir Robert Liston’s pairing with the prolific body-snatcher Ben Crouch to steal a hydrocephalic boy’s head (Ball 127). These were the men body-snatching historians deemed “respectable body-snatchers.” Their illegal 177 corpse-procuring activities form a bold chapter in the story of the great medical man, a chapter that the law helped write by forcing them to illegal supplies. It is not clear when the shift from medical resurrectionist to professional resurrectionist began. Ruth Richardson states that even though “it is not possible to date the inception of corpse commodification,” she estimates that “[b]y the 1720s, the stealing of bodies from London graveyards was almost a commonplace” (55). Modern historian Richard Hewer, in his article “The Sack ‘Em Up Men,” places the date at the middle of the eighteenth century, for “by 1750 it was a brave surgeon who would venture into a graveyard at night” (153). Another twentieth-century historian, M. J. Durey, argues that students raised their own dead up until the 1790s. Carol and Ian Ross assert that “as late as 1789 there was no general public awareness of body-snatchers,” presumably except for those instances where communities rose against particular anatomists or anatomy schools in protest when they found their loved ones’ graves missing their occupants (111). In Glasgow, it was known that Granville Pattison’s students raided burial grounds during the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century surgeon and biographer Henry Lonsdale claims that it was only “at the beginning of this century a distinct class of men engaged in the work” of body-snatching arose (50). This uncertainty points to the uneven development of corpse commodification. During the long transition, students and professionals worked together and separately. In fact, certainly students and perhaps surgeons worked on their own and with professional body-snatchers into the 1810s and possibly the 1820s (demonstrated by the existence of non-fictional body-snatching narratives of surgical students from that time period). Without a doubt, the movement from surgeon- and student-procurers to professional resurrectionist was neither sudden 178 nor consistent. For one, as the city at the forefront of dissection-based medical research, it is likely that Edinburgh came to depend primarily upon professionals earlier than Glasgow and perhaps even London. Another problem in creating this timeline is the difficulty if not impossibility of determining when the full-time, professional gangs developed, so while John Hunter worked alongside body-snatching gangs beginning in the late 1740s, it is unclear to what extent these men were “professionals”—experienced men who procured full time—or part-time amateurs. While a timeline of the professional body-snatcher’s emergence may be impossible to recover, it is certain that highly organized gangs worked in Edinburgh in the late eighteenth century, and powerful gangs controlled a significant portion of London’s market by the early 1810s. The resurrectionist’s professionalization coincided with the surgeon’s and student’s disappearance from the graveyard. Professional graveyard entrepreneurs came to the forefront of subject-procuring activities when a number of factors made such activity too dangerous for most practitioners, researchers, their students and assistants. Competition among schools, particularly between private and hospital schools, was one primary factor in fueling the struggle for subjects that resulted in a flight of medical men from graveyards. The supply squeeze began as early as 1806 when Edinburgh anatomy teachers were obliged to begin sending to London (and later Ireland) for imports. The supply situation worsened when more anatomy teachers established schools, such as Robert Liston’s in 1818 and Robert Knox’s (previously it was John Barclay’s) in 1826. At this point, the supply-pool truce could no longer be maintained. Contemporary Scottish surgeon Sir Robert Christison explains, “So long as Dr. Monro and Dr. Barclay were the only lecturers on anatomy, resurrectioning went on smoothly, because each had 179 by common consent his own territories, on which the other did not encroach” (1: 177). However, Christison goes on, “when Liston also became an anatomical teacher, he paid no regard to these prudent arrangements; Competition thus arose,” and rival groups— groups of medical students and professional gangs, sometimes in league with surgeons such as Liston himself—staked out and fought over graves (1: 177). Similarly, in London during the 1790s, Bransby Cooper recounts that “the persons who provided the Subjects had no distinct denominations, nor indeed was their existence known to the public generally” for there were “not more than three or four lecturers on the science in London,” which allowed for easy procurement (1: 344). Even up to the early 1810s, surgeon and twice President of the Royal College of Surgeons John Flint South reports, “subjects were plentiful” (29). The early century supply squeeze first drove out most medical resurrectionists while still allowing for a functioning market (that is, commodities could still be procured with relative ease); the later supply problem in the late 1810s through the 1820s produced supply scarcity, which made it very difficult and dangerous even for professionals to procure a supply. In the late 1810s, private lecturers established schools that competed with the hospital schools and older private schools for students and supplies. The opening of new schools was a response to a three-decade explosion in the medical student population. Between approximately 1800 and 1830, the number of students nearly tripled. In 1798, London possessed five schools and three hundred students; by 1828 there were twelve schools and eight hundred students. Between 1770 and 1790, John Hunter taught a total of 449 students while his three colleagues together taught 284 during the same time period (Moore). Less than forty years later, in Edinburgh during the 1828-1829 season 180 alone, Robert Knox had four hundred pupils (Lonsdale). In London, during the early 1820s, Edward Grainer averaged 250 to 300 pupils per year (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy). With such a growing pool of medical educators vying for subjects, no longer could “resurrectioning” go on smoothly, and certainly it could no longer be performed solely by students and assistants. Lecturers and students struggled for access to the same pool of supply, which placed a greater demand on supply and magnified risk to would-be resurrectionists. In Edinburgh, the pistol-drawing graveyard fights among groups of students, hospital surgeons’ assistants, and professionals left spoiled grounds in their wake—meaning that the ground was obviously disturbed. On occasion, frightened pupils left bodies on the grounds or outside the graveyard, and undoubtedly some groups deliberately left the graveyards a mess out of unprofessional clumsiness or to foil their rivals. Greater post- resurrection messes and noisy fights cued the public in on the grave violation going on in the name of science. They demanded stricter watch over the graves, even going so far as to divide up the watches among the neighborhood’s members. Gradually more frequent if not diligent watch rendered it more difficult to procure bodies out of the graveyards, which further restricted supply and drove procurers to rural graveyards or to importation. Scrabbling for bodies among students, assistants, and emerging professionals combined with an angry populace and pistol-toting watchmen, all of which produced progressively greater risks to body and life. Public watchfulness and anger led to serious injury and even death among the medical resurrectionists; such stories about severely injured students and medical men circulate in histories and medical biographies. As the difficulty of procuring subjects and the risk of physical harm increased, it appears that students, 181 assistants, and medical men slowly gave up the business to body-snatchers. This change did not abolish spiraling mismatch of supply and demand, public anger, and ever-greater professional risk, but it did shift the risk from middle-class students and medical men onto a group of working-class men. The medical man’s professionalization story thus engenders a second profession. This economic story of buying and selling dead bodies creates a class-framed story. The peddlers of the commodified corpse arose from the ranks of the working classes—some of the professional, full-time resurrectionists being originally gravediggers, sextons, and hospital porters—while in later days the unprofessional part-time snatchers came in some part from the ranks of the industrial “reserve army,” such as out-of-work laborers and potters. By far, the most raided culling field for the rotting corpse-commodity was the poorly protected burial grounds of the poor. vii The pauper and poor corpses were the most “fitting” because they were the most available. The wealthy could afford to bury their dead in the burgeoning private enterprise cemeteries, protected by high walls, brick- lined graves or vaults, in patented anti-body-snatching coffins or protected by the mortsafe cages. The poor, on the other hand, were obliged to bury their dead in grotesquely over-crowded urban burial grounds. Sometimes buried within a foot of the surface and other times buried in mass graves, these bodies were easily procured and sold by body-snatchers. All three resurrection-men interviewed by the 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy—each designated with a pseudonym, AB, CD, and FD—admit that the poor constituted the largest portion of subjects. The easiest subjects to procure were “workhouse subjects,” CD reports and goes on to say “we can get them out of the burial- ground without any difficulty whatever” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 182 119). They did procure “[b]oth classes,” according to FD, “but we could not obtain the rich so easily, because they were buried so deep” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 119). In the struggle for survival, the resurrectionists victimized those of their own class. Such a man, Magistrate Twyford argues, “throws away all regard for . . . the opinion of his own caste or rank in society” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 97). Certainly, the laborers in the corpse market drew upon them the wrath of their community and so made themselves outcasts for the sake of trade. Survival was more important than class solidarity. Body-snatching was not merely a business. It was also a profession. viii Disinterment was not a profession that just any person could take up successfully. The work required the ability to move quickly and silently; to create and maintain a network of bribed agents in the burial business; to identify and disarm graveside booby-traps; to discern, remember, and restore the positions of flowers, shells, stones, and other objects the survivors laid on the grave in order to determine if it had been disturbed; to bargain successfully with dissecting-room porters, assistants, and their employers; and above all to avoid the law while carrying on frequent market transactions. Of course, the professionals were skilled at disinterment, so while two nineteenth-century surgeons’ stories about their adventures as student-resurrectionists tell of five-hour resurrection jobs, a professional could extract a body in fifteen minutes (Day; Warren). As in any business, the amateurs far outnumbered the professionals, the former numbering as much as two hundred and the latter no more than ten (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy). Even dissectors and their supporters who elsewhere portray body-snatchers as an undifferentiated mass of dangerous and criminal men on rare occasion admit that there 183 were respectable professionals. Professionals “who really do follow the raising of bodies as a livelihood,” the very ones who should be most depraved according to critics’ arguments linking familiarity with the dead to corrupted morals, were the respectable ones (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 104). They were capable of being “active and useful men,” and, as two policemen tell Select Committee Chairman Henry Warburton, “are very respectable and decent in their manner and follow the thing so privately that nobody knows anything about it; there are some very steady” (Cooper 1: 395; Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 104). Bransby Cooper reports that resurrectionist Bill Harnett “seems to have been a more respectable man than one would have expected,” and the great resurrectionist Murphy was “for an uneducated man, . . . one of the cleverest I have ever known” and “in general very civil, and very rarely drunk” (1: 131, 434). In contrast, amateurs were criminal “interlopers” with “suspicious” characters. Professional body-snatchers also sought firmly to differentiate between themselves and the amateurs. Amateurs, AB laments during his interview at the 1828 Select Committee investigation, “that have lately got into the business . . . are nothing but petty common thieves” who make disinterment a cover for their house-breaking and robbery (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 71). By attributing thievery to the newcomers, AB protects the integrity of the “real” businessmen in his field, the professionals. These pseudo-resurrectionists, he continues, “never supplied to schools in their lives; they get a subject or two, and call themselves resurrection-men” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 73). AB goes on to state that there are “not above two or three” whom he trusted enough to partner up with for a disinterment job (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 73). In other words, the black market created a 184 specialized type of professional. Contrary to contemporary depictions of body-snatchers as an undifferentiated mass of part-time resurrectionists-most-time thieves, there were part-time amateurs, and there were full-time, skilled professionals. Medical men bitterly complained about the ever-rising outlay their procurers demanded and decried their procurers as extortionists. The dissectors refused to account for their own role in the market (heightening demand and encouraging amateurs) and shifted all blame to their procurers. It is true that the gangs squeezed their clients, exerting a power over their social betters to an extent that perhaps no other lower-class work-defined group of the time approached. The editor of The Diary of a Resurrectionist, James Blake Bailey, writes that these businessmen “knew that they could command their own terms, and would not supply any subjects until the teachers had conceded all their demands” (47). These demands were not unstructured or unrelated to market pressures. Once the professional gangs gained control over much of the supply, at the beginning of each season (October to May), the gang leader demanded from each teacher a douceur (a down payment for the season), an oral contract whereby he agreed to supply a particular school at a fixed price, usually higher than the previous season’s average price, and finishing fees at the end of the season. It seems that fees climbed nearly every year. In the late eighteenth century, an adult subject cost £2; in the 1810s the price doubled to £4; and in the 1820s the price doubled multiple times, varying between £8 (for those with great bargaining power) to £16; on some rare occasions, the price reached over £21. ix However, contrary to dissectors’ claims, the resurrectionists were not merely extortionists. As in any business, pressures of supply and demand affected the commodity’s market value. Along with the usual stress, such as competition among 185 schools and between and within gangs, additional burdens upon safety and supply emerged in the late 1810s. With the high rates of inflation in the corpse market, there developed a more wide-spread interest in body-snatching on the part of non-professionals whose unskillfulness led them to conduct badly managed resurrections and whose ignorance of the business’s customs and gang territories resulted in imbroglios with professionals. Professionals also drew attention to their practices by intentionally ruining graveyards out of spite and informing on other snatchers to the authorities. In the early 1820s, the College of Surgeons placed even more demands on supply through bylaws restricting recognized schools and the length of the anatomy season even as the College decried the very body-snatchers its bylaws rendered indispensable. x In such an atmosphere, resurrectionists put their lives at risk, inserting their bodies into the dangerous place dissectors and their students gave up and demanded payment accordingly. Body-snatchers caught by a mob were beaten to death, shot, and mauled. According to AB, “The risk is almost beyond describing,” for “You are subject to be shot in the first place, and in the next place, if you are taken, the parish prosecutes you, and you may get six or twelve months imprisonment” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 70). CD adds that “on one occasion one man was shot in four places” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 19). As an inevitable result of laissez-faire market functioning, ever-increasing risk and ever-tightening supply pools produced a significant spiral of prices. In disclaiming responsibility for the market’s insatiability and viciousness, dissectors sanitize their own role in the moral morass while shifting all blame to the men who risked their lives and freedom to bring them their required subjects. 186 Dissectors created the market and the supply problem but resented the procurers whose business they made indispensable. Part of what made association with procurers most “odious and disgusting,” Southwood Smith laments, is that “[medical men] are obliged to encourage them, to bear with their caprice, tyranny, and insult” (“Anatomy” 133). The procurers’ favored position in a tight market likely guaranteed their lack of submissiveness—an abomination in a social milieu defined by class-based respectability and a hierarchy of deference. Furthermore, surgeons could not punish their procurers by withdrawing their business. Because the resurrectionists knew surgeons could not function without their graveyard commodities, the procurers were able to eschew deference when it was more profitable to squeeze their clients and perhaps more pleasurable not to scrape and bow to those, their social superiors, who increasingly spoke of the lower classes as an unsanitary, low lot and at times treated them as such. The problem, as dissectors saw it, was more than the fact that medical men had to construct business relationships with the working-classes without the customary power-based buffers that permitted the middle-classes to maintain an upper hand. Resurrectionists were neither polite nor deferential tradesmen—they were self-interested, deceptive, knew their power and used it to their advantage, as much as a “city man” might have done. The body-snatcher’s story of economic prowess threatened to rewrite the brave dissector’s story. He makes the medical explorer who is forced to transact with the underclass procurer a victim to his own ambition, the market, and the law. The resurrectionist also exposes the constructedness of the dissector’s story—the story that conveniently leaves out the profession that made possible his rise to respectability, except when placing all blame upon that despised group of procurers. Recognizing their power 187 over their higher-class clients, the resurrectionists learned to manipulate the market and threaten the medical man’s reputation and career in order to augment their market share and lucrativeness of trade. For one, during the 1820s, they set hospital and private schools against one another. When Edward Grainger founded his anatomy school in 1819 (in 1821 he moved the school to Webb-street), the resurrectionists used him as bargaining leverage against his competitors, their clients at St. Thomas’s and St. Bartholomew’s, who refused to accede to that season’s douceur (£40 to £50) and set price per subject (4 guineas) (South). The gang refused to service St. Thomas’s, instead bringing the subjects to Grainger’s school, which greatly facilitated the success of his fledging endeavor (South). Resurrectionists also disciplined their unruly or straying clients, punishing both teachers and that market’s equivalent of “scabs,” independent and irregular contractors who would supply the schools on the sly. If a teacher refused to pay a douceur or agree to that season’s prices, the gang refused to supply him and watched his establishment. If the teacher contracted for the season bought bodies from another supplier, the gang would break into the dissecting-room and cut the bodies to pieces or give information to the police, resulting in dissection-room searches, embarrassment, and occasional public riot. On the extreme end of brutal business practices, the graveyard businessmen threatened to bring ruin upon errant clients. After Joshua Brookes, often the subject of extortion and near ruination, refused to pay for a subject, a gang placed two putrid bodies outside his anatomy school early in the morning. Two women stumbled over those poor decaying corpses, raised a great commotion, and drew an angry mob. Brookes expresses more than once his dependence upon the nearby police station for saving his school and his life. “I should have been immolated, but for my contiguity to the police office,” he says, even 188 though a policeman at the station received a silver staff from the community as an expression of their gratitude for his recovering so many of their dead from his school (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 82). Medical men expressed bitterness about their connection with the resurrectionists and deplored being thus subjected to their racketeering-style business practices, but so long as the law refused to grant medical men a higher allowance of corpses, there was little they could do about their procurers. They did, however, like Brookes, lament their business connection by publicly narrating the shame to which body-snatchers subjected them, respectable gentlemen who sought only to tend to the public’s health. Complaints about the law’s injustice represented another of the dissector’s inaccurate self-defense narrative maneuvers. Trapped between a property law that severely curtailed access to subjects and tort law that required dissection, frustrated medical men frequently, vociferously, and indignantly declaimed the legal paradox that forced them to the services of lower-class racketeering procurers. By the end of the 1820s, medical men and politicians uttered the same protest: The medical profession is therefore in this anomalous and absurd predicament—that the same individual, as a student, is liable to disgraceful punishment in the endeavor to acquire skill in his profession; and, as a practitioner, is subject to severe and ruinous damages, if he does not possess it. (Times 1 May 1830: 6) Their complaints justified their use of body-snatchers to the public—we are forced to it!—and yet revealed their lack of control—we are victims of the law and law-breakers! This storytelling, however, threatens the medical man’s other narrative. The image of the medical researcher driven solely by the desire to discover the name of science becomes 189 muddied by the image of the harried medical man forced to dissect and forced to engage in an embarrassing business. Actually, the medical men did not suffer much from a prosecutorial trend. For the most part, occasional prosecutions and rare indictments in the early nineteenth century pinned down the body-snatchers rather than those who commissioned them. As Bransby Cooper explains, the magistrates, “fearful of obstructing the progress of medical education, and of unnecessarily exciting and exasperating popular feeling and prejudice, always avoided taking cognizance of the reception of Subjects by surgeons . . . unless attended with some flagrant breech of propriety” (Cooper 1: 344). In the light of this admission, it is not surprising that of approximately thirty-nine body-snatching cases reported in The Times between 1800 and 1832, only one involved the prosecution of an actual surgeon—a surgeon who beheaded his relatives’ corpses in his family vault— while the other involved students—a group of five who assaulted a constable and patrol- man during their resurrecting activities. Even when the 1828 case Rex v. Davies and Others technically made the possession of a body known to have been disinterred a crime, there was no explosion of surgeon-centered prosecutions. In fact, the case itself neglected to charge the surgeon who supplied the dissecting room or the surgeon who purchased the body, convicting instead a dispensary student and the stationer’s apprentice who helped him carry the subject, neither of whom participated in disinterring or purchasing the body. Like the medical man, the resurrectionist benefited (but less often) from official connivance. At least one surgeon at the 1828 Select Committee remarks upon the “rarity of prosecutions” back when resurrectionists “were usually liberated” instead of 190 imprisoned (106). Asked whether magistrates considered disinterment a crime “in which they feel themselves called upon to be particularly zealous and active,” Bow-street magistrate Thomas Halls responds, “Certainly not” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 95). Thames magistrate Twyford feels it his “duty . . . to put a stop to the practice of exhumation,” and yet “very seldom” were disinterment cases brought before magistrates in his district (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 101). In fact, between 1822 and 1828 he had but six cases, and another magistrate reports never having a single case before him. xi Surgeons ordered and body-snatchers procured hundreds of bodies each year, and yet hundreds of corpse-theft cases did not appear before the assizes despite the high public feeling against and general disgust towards the profession. In nearly one-quarter (eight) of The Times’s body-snatching reports, the resurrectionists escaped unscathed with the body, and only seven reports include a verdict and punishment. According to medical commentators, the press did not shun reporting body- snatching activities. Reporting “exaggerated and disgusting statements,” the press, Southwood Smith complains, “has done every thing in its power to inflame the passions, which it was its duty to endeavour to soothe” (Use of the Dead to the Living 33). It is likely that there were more cases that were not reported, and certainly The Times was not the only paper to report on body-snatching. But considering the hundreds of corpses procured each London dissecting season for thirty years, it is telling that so few cases appeared in The Times, particularly since resurrection stories were sufficiently sensational to guarantee public interest. Buyer and seller alike benefited from the law’s purposefully blind eye, but the former fared far better than the latter in escaping punishment, despite the dissector’s cries of victimization. The real victims of the law here 191 are the families of the poor whose dead relatives’ bodies were rudely taken up, paid for, cut to pieces, and stared at in classrooms, private dissecting-rooms, and museums. The police and magistrates afforded far more protection to surgeons and even their hated procurers than to vulnerable corpses. Thus, is it that the medical man’s self-justification and narrative of victimization becomes convoluted, his story contradictory and even intentionally inaccurate. Those extortionists ruin me with their unreasonable prices, he cries, but it is the medical man and his College that makes the supply so tight and so necessary. He cries out that the law hunts him, but really magistrates turn a blind eye to his economic relations. He rails against disinterment, and yet he pays people whom he decries as criminally prone to dig up bodies. Exhumation, Southwood Smith declares, “is in the highest degree revolting; it would be disgraceful to a horde of savages; every feeling of the human heart rises up against it . . . it is alike odious to the ignorant and the enlightened, to the most uncultivated and the most refined,” yet, he goes on, “so long as no other means of procuring bodies for dissection are provided, it must be tolerated,” and not merely tolerated but actively supported and cultivated (Use of the Dead to the Living 40). The dissector is the victim, his protests against the law an admission of powerlessness and a confession that his work with bodies and consequent support of illegal procurement are not entirely by choice. This tale is contradicted by his own memoirs and parliamentary testimony. Medical men were especially sensitive to their professional reputations. They had been seeking for at least a century to differentiate themselves from the quack and empirical doctor, thereby raising their professional status to that of a gentleman of 192 education rather than an ill-educated mountebank. In the name of respectability, he protested the legal and illegal supplies. The origin of corpse supplies had long been a canker to the medical man’s dignity. The royal grant of murderers’ bodies for dissection affected the medical man’s reputation by working “to bring dissection into bad repute with all classes of society,” thereby tending “to lower the character of the profession in the public mind” (Lonsdale 50; “Anatomy Bill” 921). Surgeons complained that the anatomist’s continuity with the notion of capital punishment and murder contaminated his profession in the public’s opinion. The medical man resented his forced connection to the hangman, a necessity when tapping into his legal supply; likewise, he resented a forced connection with body-snatchers when purchasing bodies illegally. A Lancet contributor charges that buying bodies “is a practice which lessens the teacher in the estimation of the student, and induced the latter to view the labours of the former rather as a filthy source of profit, than as a cultivation of a useful and noble science” (15 May 1829: 212). Interaction with the resurrectionists, Bransby Cooper writes, echoing the complaints of many other medical men, “may be considered as some of the principal causes which have prevented the members of the Medical profession maintaining that rank in society of which the usefulness of their purpose rendered them justly worthy” (Cooper 1: 359). Connection with those whom the public despised threatened to contaminate the medical man’s reputation and “the science itself,” even though those low men conducted their business at the behest of the surgeons. Not a few editorials, articles, and depositions at the 1828 parliamentary investigation stress the necessity of doing away with the corpse market and its businessmen for the sake of the reputations of medical men. Medical men suffered from a “stigma . . . [that] had not unfrequently been cast upon 193 them by the public, on account of their connexion with” body-snatchers (Cooper 1: xiii). Even as they admit the shameful nature of the illegal market to which they turn, medical men begin to assert their innocence in the affair by shifting public attention away from the role that the shift in medical theory towards the discovery and interpretation of empirical facts as well as individual and professional ambition played in requiring their use of resurrection-men. It is the law, not ambition, that forces them to illegal activities. Furthermore, the shame originates with the procurers, not the clients. The victim narrative proclaims the medical man’s innocence despite his role as client and contributes to the shift of blame. This blame-shifting mode of self-defense formed only part of the medical man’s reaction to the threat to his respectability. He proffered a victim narrative that placed blame on the law and the procurer, and he fabricated a moral barrier differentiating and distancing middle-class buyer from lower-class seller. The barrier’s organizing principle argued that it was the resurrectionist rather than the medical man who was self-serving and criminal. From self-defense arose a narrative sanitizing the medical man—eliding his profit interests in the corpse, his questionable ethics when procuring specimens, even the illicitness of his status as client and sometime snatcher—and demonizing the body- snatcher by placing upon his profession all profit-hungry immorality and criminality. Carried on through name-calling and storytelling, the demonization degraded the body-snatcher from professional to immoral criminal, deflected public anger and criticism from client onto procurer, and transferred the dissector’s moral strain to the procurer. Much of what is known about body-snatchers comes from their beleaguered, bitter clients and later historians who based their analyses upon the publications and 194 biographies of the annoyed surgeons. According to the nearly unanimous characterization of the sack-‘em-up men by their employers and law agents, only those of the worst morals engaged in such a business. Anatomy teacher and the London resurrectionists’ favorite victim Joshua Brookes offers the following bitter evaluation very much in line with the assertions of his fellow dissectors: “they are the most iniquitous set of villains that ever lived” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 82). Two police officers class them with thieves, two magistrates claim “I know there are many men who have been in the hulks, or transported,” most medical men call them felons (thieves, pickpockets, housebreakers) “capable of any crime,” and future Inspector of Anatomy James Somerville says that even “the better class are receivers of stolen goods” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 33, 104, 48). It is indisputable, these reports proclaimed: the resurrectionist is a great public enemy, being an all-around nuisance and criminal, a thief, a drunkard, and even a murderer. Despite what was said by medical men, politicians, and writers about the body- snatchers’ criminality, the full-time resurrectionists do not seem to have tended inordinately towards criminal activities apart from the law-breaking required during procuring. Out of twelve professional body-snatchers about whom historians and medical men write most often, four are reported to have been imprisoned or transported for crimes not directly involving body-snatching: two of those involved graveyard theft (Vaughn was transported seven years for stealing grave clothing, and Patrick Connolly was imprisoned for robbing graveyards), a third was mail robbery (Butler sentenced to death for robbing the Edinburgh mail but received a pardon from the Prince Regent, procured by the Austrian Archdukes John and Lewis, who were much impressed with the horse 195 skeleton he articulated whilst in prison), and lastly Holliss was imprisoned for horse- stealing (Blake; Cooper; Richardson; South). Body-snatchers’ chroniclers from whose works some of the most egregious instances of name-calling emerge sought to vilify rather than excuse their subjects, and so it is most probable that if there were non- procurement-related crimes in abundance, they would have been reported. Instead, resurrectionists’ contemporaries and later historians referred to their criminality, particularly their thievery, but without pointing to specific instances. Moreover, these men did yearn towards the appearance of respectability. Jack Harnett and gang-leader Ben Crouch, neither of whom was liked by their employers, sought to make themselves appear “respectable” (wealthy). Both had a penchant for gold jewelry. Jack used his money to buy and sell houses and on his death left £6,000 to his family. Crouch built a hotel at Margate, which initially was a success, until his previous employment became known, after which he was obliged to sell his property at a loss. He subsequently died poor. In the name of vilifying the human ghoul, the stereotype of resurrectionist as habitual criminal simplifies a complex trade, ignores the levels of professionalization, and misrepresents snatchers’ life-histories. Along these lines, by projecting all profit motives onto the resurrectionist, the constructed medical narrative displaces the ambitious and sometimes profit- or fame- driven medical man with the image of a selfless discoverer who worked in the name of science. Twentieth-century historians continued the endeavor to sanitize the medical story while demonizing the resurrectionists. Accordingly, they argue that resurrectionists were habitual criminals, unlike the medical men who were law-abiding law-breakers. In their chronicles, historians of body-snatching James Moores Ball, H. P. Tait, Richard 196 Hewer, and M. J. Durey build and defend a moral wall between what they term “gentlemen resurrectionists” and the “human ghouls.” The first category includes “anatomists, surgeons, physicians and medical students, who, though their activities were illegal, were largely animated by a desire to advance science” (H. Tait 117). The illegal and sometimes morally questionable activities of the medical men were excusable because conducted in the name of science. Perplexingly, Hewer claims that “surgeons and their friends . . . were basically law abiding citizens committing occasional lawless acts” (153). Medical men, in other words, were law-abiding except when they broke the law, and although they committed “lawless acts,” their behavior is excusable because it was not in the name of profit or the furthering of individual reputation and wealth. In short, explains Ball, “The distinction between the two groups is founded upon the motive for their illegal acts” (71). “Solely for financial gain”: the words echo from text to text. The actions of “human hyenas” are irredeemable because motivated by profit. But really this is a tale of two thieves, or the thief and the receiver of stolen goods. It is true that eminent surgeons could coerce their private patients, via cultural blackmail, to donate their body parts or relatives’ bodies to science, but more often the medical man was a thief and the poor his victims. Before and after the 1832 Anatomy Act, poor and pauper bodies provided the legal source of subjects and parts surgeons procured by theft and coercion. There was an “unspoken anatomical quid pro quo . . . whereby patients undergoing surgical interventions were promised operations in return for the physical manifestations of disease or deformity” (Reinarz 430). Give me your flesh, the surgeon’s bargain went, or I will not treat you, and you will die. Outright theft of bodies or body parts constituted another significant source of supply. Ruth Richardson 197 writes in her well-researched and thorough study on the Anatomy Act, Death, Dissection and the Destitute, “The vast majority of anatomical and pathological specimens currently on display in the Hunterian Museum and at the Royal College of Surgeons were taken without consent from hallowed graves, or during surgical operations or postmortems” (416). It is certain that bodies and parts of interest often were stolen without the survivors’ knowing. Nineteenth-century medical man Samuel Warren recounts the case of a charity patient at the Borough Hospitals whose family, once they found that she was dying “and had an inkling of our intention to open the body, . . . insisted on removing her immediately from the hospital, that she might die at home” (322). Warren confronted them, resorting to crude and cruel reasoning: “‘if you are afraid only of our dissecting her,’” he told the woman’s family, “‘we can get hold of her, if we are so disposed, as easily if she die with you as with us’” (Warren 322). He kept his word. He, two of Sir–— ’s dressers, and a hired Irish laborer exhumed the woman’s body. Later, Warren enthuses that “her bleached skeleton adorns –—’s surgery; and a preparation of her heart enriches –—’s museum!” (338). As for her family, “for all they know, she is now mouldering away in –— churchyard” (Warren 338). The surgeon thus abolishes his uncertainty with his knife, then prepares and displays evidence of his once-tentative but now-secure prognosis to be gazed at and admired by a legion of students. The heart is not granted but stolen, and the scientist’s curiosity justifies it. The body-snatcher stole the corpse from its grave; medical men stole from the corpse before burial, even as it lay on his operating or dissecting slab. Graveyard theft ceased after the 1832 Act, but pre-burial theft perpetrated by the very practitioners who proclaimed themselves so interested in the common welfare went on and on, even to the present day. 198 Despite the dissector’s protests, the threat to medical respectability granted critics a way to rephrase the narrative into one of the medical monster rather than medical savior. The corpse trade was not a story of medical-man-as-victim and resurrectionist-as- perpetrator but of two criminals. Critics deconstructed the medical man’s client-procurer divide by exposing their parallels in the corpse-trading business. The clients were not somehow removed from the business but were profoundly implicated in it and its monstrous productions—murdered bodies. In fact, critics declared, the medical man bore more responsibility for sins in the name of the market than the body-snatcher. The blame is shared, a Lancet editorialist argues: “the filthy, immoral, disgusting, and unnatural traffic in dead bodies . . . has so long been carried on between resurrection-men and their not-more-respectable companions, the well-known human carcass-butchers,” the surgeons (Lancet 10 April 1830: 51). The anatomy teacher encourages resurrectionists “and creates a class of men alike dangerous and disgraceful to science” (Lancet 10 April 1830: 51). The dissector is no victim; he is the perpetrator, the one who creates criminals. Another Lancet editorial notes that “the resurrectionists are checked by the vigilance of a responsible order of men [surgeons], to whom, as servants, they are amenable for their conduct,” and so the client is responsible when the procurer goes astray (“On the Exportation” 777). The medical man’s respectability thus becomes entangled with the resurrectionist’s good behavior. The stakes of respectability were significantly raised with the discovery of burking—Burke and Hare in Edinburgh, 1828, and Bishop and Williams, London, 1830. Both sets of men smothered their victims (the former by sitting on the body and covering the face or nose and mouth, the latter by hanging the victim head first into a well until drowned) whose bodies they sold to anatomy schools. 199 Dissecting-room porters, assistants, students, and lecturers repeatedly failed to discern marks of murder. Critics contended that surgeons who do not “take strict guard against the revolting consequences,” such as murder, that come of employing “men of the most notorious character . . . are much to blame” (Humanitas). What is more, “what kind of surgeon [were] they . . . or what is the use of anatomy itself,” asks a correspondent of The Times, “if these learned butchers could not discover that the subject had died a violent death?” If medical men give forensic evidence of the sort that can hang men, “how can it be explained that those operators who dealt with Burke, did not discover that the subject so offered to their scientific examination had died and violently?” (Times 31 Dec. 1828: 3). The murders of subjects placed into question the reputation of medical men and medicine itself. Dissection taught nothing and cultivated criminality, critics contended. The medical man, by intention or ignorance, was a creator of monsters, a Macbeth who ordered his murderers to do deadly deeds. According to the critics’ logic, the dissector was not merely no better than but was in fact worse than his lower-class economic partner. Besides writing a counter-narrative that made the medical man responsible for the production of monsters, critics spoke of the medical man as potential monster. In this narrative, the surgeon’s capacity to feel was corrupted, worn away in fact, by that work on dead bodies, for his work as a dissector required that he be unmoved by what he cut apart. As before, this attack on medical respectability depended upon joining the two economic fellows—client and procurer—rather than separating them as medical men so passionately sought to do. In the corpse market, Patrick Colquhoun explains in the 1826 edition of his Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis, familiarization leads 200 to desensitization and moral blight, which engenders the capacity for impenitent murder. Upon such a basis, Colquhoun ties together teacher and procurer, binding them with the corruption that too much intercourse with the commodified corpse produces. “The ferocious character of the resurrectionists, and even the habits of some anatomists, show the hardening tendency of the principle we deprecate,” that is, coarseness of feeling towards the dead and moral brutalization (Colquhoun 201). Medical men do not deny this tendency towards hardness. “[P]ractical insensibility,” a Lancet editorialist asserts, is “acquired in the dissecting-room” (10 April 1830: 50). For Astley Cooper, “disgust or fear at the sight of the dead, he could not comprehend, much less tolerate” (Cooper 2: 105). Lonsdale, however, takes care to differentiate between insensibility towards the dead and insensibility towards the living, which many claim is a natural result of familiarity. “Of the hydra-headed popular fallacies prevalent in nineteenth-century England,” Lonsdale writes, “none is greater than the supposition of the anatomist’s familiarity with the dead impairing or destroying his respect for the living” (236-7). Possessing feelings towards the dead works against the dissector’s agenda—for what researcher can slice open bodies daily if he feels that each cut is a violation?—and yet, unlike his lower-class procurer, the medical man may be desensitized towards the dead while maintaining respect for living bodies. In rejecting his likeness to his procurer, the medical man characterizes himself as a contradiction, desensitized and sensitive. Novels add to the critics’ counter-narratives. Some narratives depict dissecting men as murderers and cannibals. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher” (1884) follows critics of the 1820s and 1830s by implying that profit and proximity to the dead contaminate morals. “[C]lever, dissipated, and unscrupulous” demonstrator Wolf 201 Macfarlane studied abroad, which implies Parisian studies associated with an abundant corpse supply (Stevenson 309). Frequent dissection meant prolonged proximity to dead bodies, which brought about sensibility-corrupting familiarity with the dead, a rule that Macfarlane demonstrates. He convinces fellow medical student Richardson to remain silent about Jan Galbraith’s murder (the woman whose body the Richardson purchased from resurrectionists) and forces him to accept payment for Mr. Gray whom Macfarlane murdered. This latter exchange of money—Richardson’s profiting off of a wrongfully procured dead body—corrupts his ethics, transforming him from the man who exclaimed “‘My God . . . but what have I done?’” into a potential blackmailer and atheist (Stevenson 313). “‘Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities— they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them,’” he tells a discomfited Macfarlane who “felt a certain touch of alarm . . . [and] regretted that he had taught his young companion so successfully” to smother sensibility like himself (Stevenson 316). Macfarlane’s hardness about the business of procuring and paying for corpses, murdered or disinterred, is contagious, particularly when tied with payment for subjects. It is, then, a slippery slope from diligent medical student to blackmailer and pitiless murderer. A comic version of the medical man robbed of his sensibility by his training in the dissecting room may be found in Charles Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers, which presents what Sam Weller calls “‘a couple o’ Sawbones,’” though being students they “‘ain’t reg’lar thorough-bred Sawbones’” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 428). Mr. Pickwick, evidently not having much experience with the Dickensian medical student, says, “‘They are fine fellows . . . with judgments matured by observation and reflection, and tastes 202 refined by reading and study’” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 428). Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen’s tastes indeed have been refined by study, specifically by the dissecting lessons. “‘Nothing like dissecting to give one an appetite,’” Sawyer exclaims at breakfast (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 129). While Sawyer and Allen maintain “their attack upon the breakfast,” they discuss body parts in the same language as they might discuss their food. “‘[H]ave you finished that leg yet?’” Allen asks Bob, who responds while “helping himself to half a fowl,” which misleads the reader into believing they might be discussing their breakfast until Bob adds a most unsavory addendum: “‘It’s a very muscular one for a child’s’” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 430). Allen goes on conversing about arms and heads with Bob, whose mouth is full of food and the language of dismembered body parts. Bob, at least, is not so dissipated that he can dissect a head, the most difficult body part to disassociate from humanness. “‘I wouldn’t mind a brain,’” he explains to Allen, “‘but I couldn’t stand a whole head’” (Dickens, Pickwick Papers 431). In Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, the dissector really is a sort of cannibal, made hungry by dissecting. Novels more fully support the resurrectionist-as-criminal portrait. The fictional body-snatcher is a character without context or economy- or survival-defined motive. He needs no reason, nor contract, nor client. The body-snatcher is not a businessman but a depraved man who does bad things for no apparent reason apart from pure wickedness. Accordingly, no individual surgeon-client appears to order the resurrectionist to his business in Lucretia (1846), Mansie Wauch (1828), or A Tale of Two Cities (1859) (though the latter certainly discusses economic relations). The lack of context in terms of time or purpose—for while they do steal bodies, neither the sale nor the client plays a prominent role—indicates the resurrection man’s function as a figure of horror. George 203 William MacArthur Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London begins its narrative’s twelve- year span in 1831, merely one year before the Anatomy Act was passed, but the oddly named resurrection-man Tony Tidkins does not enter the story until 1835, by which time his profession is a defunct one. Long after the Anatomy Act, Trefor Thomas writes his introduction to The Mysteries of London, the body-snatcher “remained a potent source of superstitious dread within the folk memory” (xviii). The profession maintained sufficient power culturally as the symbol of horror and criminality so that the body-snatcher might reasonably play a significant role in a piece set after the profession’s demise. Such characterization supports the medical man’s attempts to rewrite the resurrectionist’s story as that of a criminally inclined, untrustworthy, altogether bad man. Nineteenth-century writers most often depict the body-snatcher as a bogeyman whose horrible business is both an adjunct to other criminal activities and a manifestation of his bad character. The narrator of Mansie Wauch calls them “unearthly resurrection men, or rather let me call them deevils incarnate, wrapt up in dreadnoughts, with blacked faces, pistols, big sticks, and other deadly weapons” (Moir 51). In Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher,” the graveyard entrepreneurs are “unclean and desperate interlopers” and “ghouls” who proffer murdered bodies to their clients (307, 308). Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Lucretia presents the resurrectionist titled “Gravestealer” as stupid but brutal—“all muscle and brawn in form, all malice, at once spiteful and dull” (287). Gravestealer does no body-snatching during the tale, nor need he, for the fact of his profession and how he fits it physically and morally renders him horrible to other characters. Even the cracksman and Gabriel Varney, the self-absorbed and otherwise fearless criminal artist, shrink from him. Likewise, Reynolds’s Tony Tidkins is a low 204 character, a vengeful blackmailer who informs on his criminal comrades Cranky Jem and Bill the Bolter in order to earn rewards unrelated to the body-snatching business rather than for the sake of business, the reason for which actual body-snatchers informed on others. The Cracksman and the Buffer participate in disinterment and burking in the style of the London burkers Bishop and Williams, but only Tidkins is designated as the Resurrection Man. Being a resurrectionist signals his brand of criminality—one lower than that of robbers and murderers who do not descend to informing upon their friends for profit. Even among criminals, the body-snatcher is a social outcast, hated and disgusting. Even more horrible than the resurrectionist as the lowest of criminals is the resurrectionist as cannibal. Whereas Bob Sawyer and Benjamin Allen are cannibals by comic association, body-snatchers are cannibals by grotesque association. Confessions of a Dissecting-Room Porter, published in The Medical Times 1839 to 1841, offers a semi- humorous song, “The Resurrection Man: Legend of By-Gone Days” (the title of which distances the corpse market from the tales of medical students). The poem’s dead speakers complain of “sacrilegious knaves/ Who craves as hungry vultures crave,/Behaving as the Goul behaves,/ . . . /Mayhap because he fed on graves” (“The Resurrection Man” 7). Through the carrion-eater metaphor, the figurative cannibalism of the man who feeds upon the dead by selling bodies becomes more vivid by obliterating the mediation of money. Instead, the snatcher feeds directly upon the dead like the flesh- tearing vulture. The resurrectionist is not a man hungry for profit but for dead flesh. Furthermore, his hunger grows because of continued grave work. The taste of human flesh engenders not satiety but hunger for more dead flesh. Similarly, Lytton’s 205 description of Gravestealer, whose eyes are “covered with a film, like that of the birds which feed on the dead,” associates the body-snatcher with carrion-loving scavenger birds (254). Such cannibalistic imagery materializes in non-fiction commentary as well. Nineteenth-century doctors and their critics occasionally refer to resurrectionists as “ghouls,” and early twentieth-century historians follow suit. Several of these chroniclers inappropriately include Catherine Crowe’s Light and Darkness (1850) among lists of texts that feature body-snatchers. The only tale relating to disinterment is “The Lyncanthropist,” the fictionalization of an actual Parisian case wherein a military man disinterred bodies in order to consume the organs and muscles. For fiction writer, medical man, and historian, the body-snatcher is a parasite upon the dead who commits the most odious and uncivilized of crimes against the public—cannibalism. Charles Dickens’s depiction of the body-snatcher in A Tale of Two Cities is one of the very rare (if indeed there are any others!) sympathetic portraits of the resurrection- man. Reynolds’s Tony Tidkins receives sympathetic treatment in terms of his past; he is driven to body-snatching as a last resort against starvation and as a reaction to social stigmatization (because his father was a smuggler of fine brandy and perfume) by his social betters. He is not at all sympathetic as a resurrectionist. Dickens’s Jerry Cruncher is not an entire devil, demonstrates a likeable humor, and becomes more morally inclined towards the end of the narrative. At first, like other fictional resurrectionists, Jerry Cruncher provokes disgust because of his profession. “‘Ug!’” Mr. Lorry exclaims after having discovered that his porter Jerry Cruncher is a resurrectionist, “‘I am shocked at the sight of you’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 393). Also like other literary body-snatchers, Cruncher’s profession fits his character—he is an irreligious man who terrorizes, even 206 beats, his submissive, prayer-loving wife. So poisonous is the business that the body- snatcher must redeem and then disavow his work and make amends in order to become decent or at least no longer an object of disgust. To salvage Jerry Cruncher’s character, his work as an “‘honest tradesman’” in “‘a branch of scientific goods’” must be redeemed by facilitating a great good. First, his profession affords information crucial to the plot’s relatively happy resolution. Secondly, he offers to “‘make amends for what he would have undug’” by becoming a gravedigger, after which he can bring himself to excuse his wife for her flopping (praying) and even allow himself to flop (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 394)! Dickens does permit his resurrectionist a sufficient amount of humor and humanity to allow for redemption, which is denied other literary resurrectionists. Even so, a body-snatcher is always revolting and irredeemable to other characters until he is no longer a body-snatcher. Dickens’s characterization of the body-snatcher is significant because it reveals how the much-despised resurrection-man and the respected doctor are both equal players in an economic exchange. Here the resurrectionists tells his own story rather than having it told from (and distorted by) the surgeon’s point of view. This allows an alternative understanding that challenges the surgeon’s tendency to shift blame and odium onto the procurers. By questioning the moral barrier between client and procurer, that which exculpates the dissector while excoriating the resurrectionist, the narrative hints at the injustice in making the procurer the great social outcast by implying that the body- snatcher alone should not bear sole responsibility for the trade. Lorry accuses Cruncher of having “‘used the respectable and great house of Tellson’s as a blind’” for his real “‘unlawful occupation of an infamous description’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 392). 207 Perceptively, Cruncher points to the medical man’s place in the very business that makes Mr. Lorry shudder. “‘There’d be two sides to it,’” he says, “‘There might be medical doctors at the present hour, a picking up their guineas where an honest tradesman don’t pick up his . . . half fardens! no, nor yet his quarter [fardens]’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 393). Cruncher undervalues his gains—he complains about his half “‘fardens,’” but at that period bodies were at least £2 in London—but he is insightful about the connection between despised corpse-tradesman and respected doctors. By tying doctors’ guineas to the tradesman’s quarter “fardens,” Cruncher implies that the superior guineas too are products of the scientific goods and points out that doctors make more money from the business than does the body-thief. Mr. Lorry declares that in associating himself with such a trade, Cruncher imposes upon Tellson’s, threatening that institution’s integrity. In response, Cruncher declares that the doctors are “‘a banking away like smoke at Tellson’s’” and “‘a cocking their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a going in and going out to their own carriages’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 393). The money that pays for and is made from the trade in bodies nestles in Tellson’s bank while the doctor’s contract with the honest tradesman on the sly in that institution’s hallowed halls. “‘Well,’” Cruncher demands, “‘that’ud be imposing, too . . . For you cannot sarse the goose and not the gander’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 393). That is, Lorry and the other respectable people cannot despise and blame the resurrectionists and not the medical men who are their clients. His wife, Jerry complains, flops against his business, but “‘them medical doctors’ wives don’t flop . . . Or, if they flop, their floppings goes in favour of more patients’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 393). Revealing illogicality of the general stance against resurrectionists, Cruncher asks, why pray for the man who uses the 208 bodies and against the one who procures them? Complaining of the lack of profit in his line of work, Cruncher also reveals at least part of the great web of purchased complicity necessary for the business. The resurrectionist’s profits are siphoned away, “‘wot with undertakers, and wot with parish clerks, and wot with sextons, and wot with private watchmen,’” and so, he laments, “‘a man wouldn’t get much by it’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 393). Jerry Cruncher’s ungrammatical self-defense grants the reader insight into the falseness of the moral divide between the body-snatcher who procures and the surgeon who uses the dead body. Buyer and seller are intertwined, neither party more nor less criminal than the other, for both interact in the same market. “‘“Recalled to Life,” . . . may mean anything,’” Mr. Lorry explains to the unconscious Lucie Manette. Not surprisingly, considering his occupation, Jerry Cruncher has a decidedly unfavorable view on what “Recalled to Life” means—bad business. “Much of that wouldn’t do for you, Jerry!” he exclaims to himself, “You’d be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion, Jerry’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 13). Throughout Dickens’s narrative, recalling to life does in fact become quite the fashion: Dr. Manette, old Foulon (who engineered “‘a grand mock-funeral’” for himself), Sydney Carton, Charles Darnay, and Roger Cly all return to life in one way or another, in some cases in order to die. Cly’s resurrection threatens to put the honest tradesman’s business in a bad way. It was his corpse-less coffin Cruncher raised, for which Cruncher punishes his wife the following day, attributing the phenomenon to her flopping, and which later plays a key role in the plot. Acting as prosecutor in an extra- legal trial the purpose of which is to condemn the English prison spy Barsad as a traitor to the revolution, Carton presents his “cards,” proving him to be a double-agent who 209 spied for the aristocrats and the revolutionaries and who fraternizes with another English double-agent, Roger Cly. Such information would appear as “‘A plot in the prisons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong card—a certain Guillotine card!’” Carton exclaims in triumph (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 230). Roger Cly, Barsad confidently counters, was buried at Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields, and as proof, he offers a burial certificate, declaring “‘it’s no forgery’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 299). “‘It was a take-in,’” Cruncher challenges: “‘you buried paving-stones and earth in that there coffin’” (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities 299). The resurrectionist’s evidence procured during an illicit activity allows a conviction in the extra-legal trial. The extra-legal court’s conviction allows Carton to thwart the legal court’s unjust conviction of Charles Darnay. Armed with his “‘Guillotine card,’” Carton forces Barsad, one of the turnkeys at the Conciergerie, to let him in the prison and substitute his own body for that of Charles Darnay. By bringing the dead back to life, Cruncher permits two other resurrections— Charles Darnay’s and Sydney Carton’s. (The latter brings himself to life after years of doing nothing well or worthwhile in order to sacrifice that life for a greater good, and in doing so he brings the former to life by saving him from death.) Here the body-snatcher’s evidence in an extra-legal trial resurrects the dead. In real legal trials against the resurrectionist, the court used witness testimony to resurrect the dead, that is, to make the corpse human again. Contrasting both surgeons’ and resurrectionists’ application of dehumanizing or de-individualizing language to the body—calling it a thing and speaking of a head, a set of teeth, a disease instead of an individual—the English court and its reporters resurrected the individual by re- humanizing the subject. Resurrectionists did not steal things nor did surgeons dissect 210 subjects; the disinterred and scalpel-mangled corpses were individuals. When the identity of the corpse was discovered, the snatchers were indicted upon dispossessing graves of their “tenants,” individuals with names such as John Dickenson, Mr. Gardener, Harriet Bailey, Elizabeth Lane, Joanna Chennery. When possible, court evidence unfolds the corpse’s identity and relation to survivors. These corpses, dehumanized by becoming commodities, are re-humanized by the courts and papers. Having been resurrected as a surgeon’s subject by the procurer, they are again resurrected as people in the court of law. In addition to returning the dead’s names, the court reconnects them to a social milieu. The violated corpse again becomes “his father,” “her child,” “her husband,” “his wife,” and “her father-in-law.” Moreover, the court might revive the body’s living narrative, resurrecting “Joanna Chennery [who] was a very fine young woman,” “a female of the name of Knight, a married woman . . . of but indifferent character, and who was known to be connected with much vice,” or “Elizabeth Lane . . . seventeen years of age, an apprentice to Mrs. Bayne, milliner” (Times Jan 5 1824: 3; Times Jan 5 1824: 3; Times 14 July 1810: 3). On occasion, the report relates the corpse’s story as the story of a living person rather than just a disinterred dead body, concentrating upon the life-history rather than the case at hand. The resurrection of things does not merely violate the survivors, it is implied, but also the persons who are dead, these deceased men, women, and children. The courts consumed the dead to create order—swallowing witness testimony about the dead body and then producing a narrative that reanimated the corpse and provided it again with a family. The corpse provided the material with which the law wove the boundaries of social order; into these borders, the court wove the tale of the stolen corpse. Another important legal institution wove the dead’s tale into its judicial narrative, but this 211 time the purpose was to speak for the dead. The coroner’s office, centuries old, investigated the dead body in order to tell its story. This narrative traced the trajectory towards death. The inquest resurrected the dead body in a legal or medico-legal narrative in order to murder it again in the court room. 212 Chapter Three Endnotes i One hundred and thirteen years after the 1832 Anatomy Act, British “medical schools depend almost entirely on derelict, unclaimed bodies,” for while someone could donate his corpse (and evidently at the time very few did), the family had the right to protest and block such a donation after the death (“Cadaver Crisis”). By the mid-twentieth century, students did not receive what William Hunter promised his students in the eighteenth century—a subject to each dissecting student. A Time magazine article from 1945 describes the resulting severe supply crisis: “British students have been cut down from a prewar standard of 16 students per body to an average of 20 students” (“Cadaver Crisis”). In the following sixty years, donations increased but not to the extent needed adequately to supply the evolving needs of research and educational specialization. In his article, “Research Fuels Grim Trade in Death,” Michael Lachmann reports that after the passage of the 2006 Human Tissue Act, which allows more procedures to be performed on dead bodies than previously, “There are now plans for all surgeons to train on cadavers before they are let loose [on] living patients.” Most medical men of nearly 180 years ago would be shocked had they known their future professional brethren had ceased to practice first upon the dead. Astley Cooper scoffs that he who tries his surgical hand first on the living “must be a blockhead,” and goes on to declare, “I would not remain in a room with a man who attempted to perform an operation in surgery, who was unacquainted with anatomy” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 15). He would declare today’s medical men blockheads and rush precipitately from the room! However, Lachmann continues, “In 2005 . . . just 674 people donated their bodies to British medical schools,” a number insufficient for such an endeavor. Such is the demand for bodies and human tissues—now valuable in ways nineteenth-century surgeons and researchers would never have imagined: replacement body parts in surgery, for instance—that a black market flourishes. Rather than seeking out primarily whole bodies, this market, now a global one, feeds more often and profitably upon tissues and organs. “While the medical demands for human tissue remain so high,” Lachmann writes, “there will always be the opportunity for people to make a lot of money out of the trade.” Instead of fearing body-snatchers, we fear body-part-snatchers. Urban legends feature unfortunate persons waking with a single kidney; news stories report illicit theft-and-sale activities among medical schools and morgues; patients resist medical institutions’ laying claim to and profiting from their tissues and genetic data without permission or compensation. Many of us have forgotten the market, but it has not forgotten us as potential commodities. ii There is some debate over whether or not there was a medical “profession” at this time. In the eighteenth century, historian Christopher Lawrence writes, “the word medicine did not point preponderantly to a single profession, to a particular view of disease or to a particular sort of institution. . . . Treating and caring for the sick were no one’s monopoly” (7). Some historians mark professionalization at a specific point in time—the 1858 Medical Act, which represented the state’s recognition of the medical profession (Digby; Lawrence). Until the 1850s, there was no structured system of medical education and no strictures over who could work as a medical practitioner. The Act set no prohibition on who could practice medicine, but it did establish a medical register that differentiated between qualified practitioners (educated, tested, licensed, and registered) and unqualified practitioners. Only qualified individuals fill public appointments, sue for fees, and use professional titles (such as physician, surgeon, apothecary). The Act also set up the General Medical Council, which was meant to standardize medical education (but which actually preserved variation between and among qualifications, according to Francis Smith) and erase distinctions among apothecary, surgeon, and physician. Such apparent unity and standardization signaled professional formation. Ian Burney, in contrast, argues that professionalization emerged with expertise. “Expert authority,” he explains, “operates on the basis of detachments, secured through the carving out of fields of investigation, interpretation, and intervention that are deemed to require their own distinct . . . form of competence” (8). The professional, then, possesses knowledge unavailable or incomprehensible to the public, and so “the public loses not only an acknowledgement of its competence in matters heretofore considered within its sphere of legitimate activity, but also often its actual capacities” (Burney 8). I contend that professionalization was part of a lengthy striving towards respectability, specialized knowledge, and power over a professional narrative. Admittedly, the classes of medical men could not agree on the causes of diseases and were more likely to be at war with one another’s theories, statuses, and titles, than to demonstrate professional solidarity among all three branches. As inconsistent and politically and legally 213 weak as they may have been, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons were chartered by the crown; surgeons through their Company and later their College received state support (supplies of bodies); and surgeons worked in government positions under the Poor Law and Health of Towns Act, for instance. Ties between medicine and government were longstanding by the time the 1858 Act came along, and it can be argued that with constant improvements in surgery from the eighteenth century on, surgeons were gaining an expertise of the knife. Surely, not many untrained persons would sever arteries and operate upon aneurisms or hernias as surgeons did in the first half of the nineteenth century. This is not to say that the 1858 Act was not a significant point in the narrative of professionalization, but I do want to point out that medical men perceived themselves professionals (they did not perceive themselves as amateurs!), even if their professional body was an amorphous one. iii The basis for Coke’s assertion on judicial cognizance is a sentence in Britton, which Skegg points out, lacked “reference to corpses as such” but rather refers to “‘things sacred and dedicated to God by prelates and holy church, such as churchyards, burial-places, churches, chapels, and other consecrated places’” (Skegg 421). Established on an uncertain basis—“slight” and “muddy” according to some law historians— the assertion that a corpse is not property was based initially not on a particular case but a commentary on the law. Until Blackstone’s Commentaries, law interpreters (Hawkins and Hale who both state that a dead body cannot own property in reference to either the 1614 or 1617 cases of stolen winding sheets) refer to the corpse’s inability to own property rather than addressing the question as to whether or not the corpse is property. Investigators of modern law problems relating to the ownership of bodies, organs, and tissues sometimes begin by addressing the uncertain foundations of the no-property rule, particularly in relation to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interpretations of Haynes’s Case, which more than one writer has claimed “seems to have been completely misinterpreted” (Mason and Laurie 714). Haynes’s Case (1614), the first involving the body and property, ruled that corpses cannot own property, and stealing from a grave is a crime against the survivors. Paul Matthews’s well-researched essay “Whose Body? People as Property” states, “The classical writers of the common law . . . for the most part agree that there is no property in corpses, but they either cite each other or the case of a buried corpse where the question did not even arise, much less was decided” (198). In particular, Matthews points to Sir James Stephen’s and East’s assertions of the no-property rule on the basis of Haynes’s Case as “a complete perversion of the case” (Matthews 197). However, when East states that “There can be no property in a dead corpse,” he refers directly to the case of Dr. Handyside whereas Haynes’s Case is one of several references in a note titled “Corpses, &c.” that is situated on the upper left side of the paragraph without a reference pointing to a particular part of that paragraph (East 652). It can be argued that this note refers to the entire paragraph rather than the no- property rule in particular. It is most likely that the Haynes reference relates to East’s statement that “a shroud stolen from the corpse must be laid to be the property of the executors” (East 652). Sir James Stephen, however, does seem to have misread East. Justifying his statement that “The dead body of a human being is not capable of being stolen,” Stephen cites R. v. Haynes (which is misprinted in the 1 st , 3 rd , and 4 th editions as R v. Raynes) and the above-quoted portion of East’s second volume, which refers both to the corpse’s being incapable of owning property and the no-property rule. Notably, Stephen does not make this error in his earlier treatise Roscoe’s Digest of the Law of Evidence in Criminal Cases where he discusses “DEAD BODIES—OFFENCES RELATING TO” (Stephen 416). It does, then, seems that in one case Haynes’s Case was erroneously cited as the origin of the no-property rule, but this instance does not seem to warrant the repeated assertions that this case has been misinterpreted. Hawkins, Hale, Blackstone, and East do not misinterpret the case. Like Matthews, Grubb declares, Coke and the others almost certainly got it wrong. Coke seems to rely on Briton who was not referring to dead bodies at all but rather to church-yards and other sacred objects. East and Stephen refer to Haynes’s case which held that a corpse could not own property rather than it was not itself property. Also, perhaps Cokes statement should have been limited to the buried corpse since he was concerned with caro data vermibus (“Flesh given to worms”). Buried corpses were protected both the ecclesiastical law and the common law . . . it is against common law to interfere with a buried corpse and remove it as contra bonos mores. Likewise, since that dead body, once buried, becomes part of the 214 land, any deliberate interference with the body will be trespass to land under the civil law. Corpses awaiting burial are obviously in a different position. (Grubb 307) Grubb also misinterprets Matthews’s research into the Handyside case—he discovered references to the case in newspapers and at least one magazine in December 1849—as showing that the case “never actually happened” (Grubb 307). What Matthews really points out is that “the action was comprised in favour of the plaintiff, without waiting for a verdict” (Matthews 210). Explaining why this case was not reported, he goes on to say that “a case that is compromised cannot be said to have a ratio decidendi, not being decided” (Matthews 210). This case happened, but it was not decided. iv Unimpeded by a controlling corporation like that of its southern counterparts, Edinburgh preceded London in the establishment of private anatomy schools. In 1694, Alexander Monteach opened his anatomy school and procured permission from the Town Council to use the dead bodies of prisoners and foundlings whereas England’s first anatomy lectures outside the Royal College probably were Edward Nourse’s lectures at Bartholomew’s thirty-six years later. v Parliament did not establish law-binding educational curriculum for medical practitioners until the 1858 Medical Education Act, and even then, the law was permissive on restricting who could practice. The Royal College of Surgeons’ bylaws required diploma candidates to provide certificates proving their attendance at “three or more winter courses of lecture on anatomy and physiology” as well as certification “Of having performed dissections during two or more subsequent winter courses, and of having attended during the same period anatomical demonstrations” (Returns 3). Without these certificates, a student was ineligible to take the examination necessary to earn a diploma. The bylaws did not separate the ignorant student form the studious one, nor did they guarantee that only educated surgeons could act as surgeons. First, there were several scandals involving forged certificates or certificates backdated and signed by lecturers even if the student did not attend or rarely attended the course. Second, the Royal College of Surgeon’s boundaries of authority extended only seven miles from London. According to Henry Field, Deputy Warden of the Society of Apothecaries in 1828, an apothecary may “operate wherever he pleases” because the College “has only a charter, not an Act of Parliament; therefore those persons may practice in any part of the kingdom without taking out a certificate from the College of Surgeons, the charter having not sufficient power to enable the surgeons to prosecute” (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 36). Finally, the 1834 Select Committee of Medical Education makes it clear that a man may “assume, with impunity, a title he has no right to . . . [and] call himself a surgeon, though not educated as a surgeon” (Report 1834 128). Apothecaries, whose diploma did not require anatomy or dissection, and any self-styled medical man could practice, operate, and collect fees without the College’s blessing or even a diploma. vi Bequests offered one rare source of supply. However, a surgeon could not enforce a promise to bequest a corpse (Samuel Smollett promised his corpse to his friend John Hunter, but his wife refused to give it up to the surgeon), and the law could prosecute the executors who did not inter the deceased’s body. Hospitals could at times supply their own schools. Evidently, one hospital supplied its surgeons and lecturers from its own dead-house until the chaplain refused to perform services over stone-filled coffins (South 96). Another writer claims that one surgeon purchased a burial ground, charged the poor to bury their dead, then disinterred the bodies and charged other surgeons to purchase them (“Human Dissections”). vii The graveyard was not the only origin of their noisome and pricey commodities. Body-snatchers went to hospitals and workhouses, pretending to be grief-stricken relatives, in order to claim bodies (an endeavor begun by Murphy but ruined by the other gang leaders). A lucky man might come across a dead body in street, bring it to a hospital, pretending to be a relative, only to claim the body when told it is “too late.” Another hospital scheme involved offering a poor relative to bring a dying person to the hospital, only to report the death and a false interment days after the snatcher claimed the corpse, acting as the relative who brought it in. Resurrectionists paid undertakers working for the poor and working classes to substitute corpses with bricks or stones and inter coffins thus robbed of their proper contents (another “game” ruined by inter-gang competition). Some broke into houses, sometimes with the complicity of servants or lodging- house keepers, unscrewed coffins, and took the dead. Creating a “novel branch of Irish commerce,” body- 215 snatchers in the early nineteenth century took up importing bodies from Ireland (every year, according to CD’s evidence during the 1828 select committee investigation into anatomy), where the supply was abundant, due to the unprotected status Bully’s Acre where the poor were buried. Resurrectionists supplied the schools of Edinburgh, London, and the provinces, and it was their custom, “when they had bodies to send from the country to London, to forward them so that they should, in outward appearance, correspond with the class of goods exported from the place where the bodies had been obtained” (Bailey 80-82). These “boxes of mortalities, marked ‘perishable goods,’” masqueraded as perishable commodities, which indeed is what they were, perishable and inevitably perishing during the trip (Lonsdale 56). Ruth Richardson quite rightly surmises that these businessmen “were doing no more than other business people would do with other merchandise in a free market; moving goods from one part of the country in which there was a glut to one in which there was a shortage—and making money from the transaction” (103). But sometimes they would move bodies from where there was need, thereby severely decreasing the supply there available, to areas where it was even more lucrative. For instance, exporters in Ireland moved bodies to Edinburgh and London, leaving the Dublin schools without a sufficient supply, and London body-snatchers relayed bodies to Scotland, even when there was an insufficient supply in the great metropolis. viii The professionals worked in organized (albeit unstable) gangs. Each gang, John Flint South writes, functioned as a “joint-stock company, who were under the entire control and direction of the greatest and cleverest rogue of the party” (100). Members of joint stock companies pooled their money through the purchase of company stocks, used that pooled money for some entrepreneurial venture, and divided the rewards among the holders. The “joint stock” gangs pooled their professional talents in order to procure the commodity that they traded for money, which the gang leader supposedly divided evenly among the “company’s” members in addition to using some of the profit to ensure access to particular burial grounds by bribing the sextons, watchmen, and gravediggers. (A sexton, for instance, would make about 5s. per body disinterred.) The more clever the leader and powerful the group, the greater their market share, ability to command higher prices, and capacity to exert power over their clients. A clever leader remained sober at the end of a night while his coworkers drank themselves into stupidity, allowing the leader to misappropriate more than his share. The leaders regularly cheated their coworkers. In one profitable night, Murphy and his gang sold six subjects to Astley Cooper for £72 and received an additional £72 from another client, but Murphy paid out merely £5 to his other four or five workers (Cooper, vol. 1 397). When a leader was caught cheating, quarrelling, and gang fracture ensued: “the one joint-stock company broke up into two or three, and each endeavoured to anticipate the other in robbing the grounds” they commonly used (South 100). In one year, from November 1811 to December 1812, the Diary of a Resurrectionist reports six “rows” or “disputes.” The first to reach and plunder the grounds left a mess: “they would pull the coffins up, stick them on the adjoining wall, and scatter the grave clothes about, and thus the ground was effectually ‘spoilt’” (South 100). After these instances, a new watch would be set, though inevitably the new watch slipped into the pay of the gangs and “became the resurrection man’s very humble servant, and watched on their behalf” (South 100). The leader and his gang were fiercely protective of their market share and would go far to ruin others’ entrepreneurial endeavors. Out of professional jealousy and the desire to have the largest share of the market, the gangs ruined one another’s new-found means of procuring bodies. Opposing gangs fought one another over graves, and “the stronger party, after driving the weaker one away, would put the burial-ground into a most disgraceful state, and then give information against their opponents” (Bailey 75). They would inform on the irregular snatchers, spoil their working grounds, expose them to the watchmen or public, and steal and cut up their subjects. ix High prices made this profession an extraordinarily lucrative one, and the more experienced the gang, the faster they could procure bodies and bully weaker gangs into giving over their market share. A professional gang of body-snatchers (usually three or four men) could disinter and dispose of six or more bodies a night. The body-snatcher AB reports having procured twenty-three bodies in one night, and CD reports, reading from his diary, that in 1811 to 1812, his gang sold 360 larges and 56 smalls, and during the 1812-1813 season 434 adults and 32 smalls. In contrast, the new police officers earned approximately a guinea a week (after which uniform costs were deducted); during the late 1820s Robert Knox paid his porter David 216 Patterson a mere 7s. per week; a London laborer for the Royal Hospital at Greenwich earned 22 s. (3.s. 8d. per day); and a Bow Street Night Patrolman made 16s. (2s. 6d. per day). x The Royal College of Surgeons was established by royal charter in 1800 after the Company of Surgeons was declared illegal in 1796. The College continued the Company’s tendency to favor the interests of its members over those of the profession as a whole. Besides controlling who received bodies, the College unwisely exacerbated the supply problem in the early 1820s. Private schools and hospital schools had long been in fierce competition for students and requisite teaching material. Through their association with the Royal College of Surgeons, whose members supplied the hospitals with surgeons and teachers, the hospital schools gained significant advantages. In 1822, the College instituted a bylaw dictating that the Court of Examiners will accept certificates only for dissection courses taking place during the winter season (October to January), thereby invalidating summer courses and compressing an entire year’s demand into a seven-month span. In 1823 the College passed a bylaw threatening the legitimacy of winter certificates from the private schools by restricting recognized certificates to those from “appointed professors of Anatomy and Surgery in the universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and Dublin, or from persons who were physicians or surgeons to the hospitals in the recognized schools, or from persons unless recommended by the medical establishments of those hospitals” (Returns 3). While the 1822 bylaw constricted the anatomy season by time, this bylaw constricted it by place, concentrating students to a certain number of cities while tying lecturer legitimacy to the College’s recognition. Both laws intensified supply competition and favored the hospitals by abolishing the legitimacy of summer courses (taught in private schools) and exacerbating the spiral of prices that hospital lecturers were better able to handle without great loss. Notably, hospital surgeons composed the College’s Council and Court of Examiners; private anatomists and lecturers were not invited, however significant their talent. In protecting the interests of a small, elite group, the College defeated the interests of the profession as a whole by placing greater pressure on the supply, thereby ensuring more inter-gang and intra-gang rows, bad resurrections, and public anger. The price increase not only contributed to the fall of private schools that ran on a tight budget but also made it far more difficult for the struggling anatomist to do his research, augment his reputation, and build his career. The researcher needed more and more money, which either required that he be independently rich or have a booming practice. The College restricted access to the narrative of the medical explorer by restricting access to education and subject supply. xi Magistrate ignorance on body-snatching case law clearly demonstrates how infrequently disinterment cases came before the courts. One judge in 1823 “judged it necessary to consult the city solicitor as to the nature of the offence, and the manner in which it should be proceeded against” (Times 21 March 1823). Magistrate Hall claims that “the misdemeanor is for illegally disinterring, and until the body is interred, no misdemeanor is created,” clearly in contradiction to the case law established by Rex v. Young and Rex v. Cundick (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 95). There is confusion over the sale of bodies as well. Whereas Halls claims, “I know nothing in the existing state of the law to prevent” sale, Twyford counters that selling a body would be a misdemeanor on the basis that the law requires a body be interred (Report from the Select Committee on Anatomy 95). Not surprisingly, charges, indictments, and verdicts produced in such a muddy legal atmosphere presented confused notions of the appropriate charges permitted by case law. Even when a court provided an indictment and cases did reach the assizes, a guilty verdict was not guaranteed. As historians of body-snatching note, it was a difficult crime to prosecute, not the least because of the slippery no-property rule but also in part because it was a crime difficult to prove. The jury sometimes produced a not guilty verdict based on the lack of evidence, for it seemed that a man must be caught in the act or in very incriminating circumstances (with a body in tow and tools in hand) in order to be convicted. Even as public unrest increased with greater numbers of disinterment and magistrates responded by prosecuting the crime with greater diligence, neither indictment nor conviction was easy to secure. 217 Chapter Four Dead Lips Speaking: Narrating the Body’s Tale in the Nineteenth-Century Inquest Defining the inquest’s cause and purpose in his 1851 A Practical Compendium of the Recent Status, Cases, and Decisions Affecting the Office of Coroner, William Baker, barrister and coroner of East Middlesex for eighteen years, quotes an unidentified proponent of that investigative jurisprudence: ‘By the coroner’s inquest many crimes are brought to light, much evidence arises, and many important facts are disclosed on view of the bodies of persons who die suddenly, or by the hand of violence. . . . The life of every fellow-subject is of consequence not only to his immediate connections, but to the country; and, dying out of the ordinary course, the cause of death must be inquired into . . . for the protection of all who survive.’ (qtd. in Baker 2) This is the nineteenth-century coroner’s theory of the inquest’s function: by investigating the dead, the inquest protected the living. An important and potentially powerful part of what an 1850 article in The Times called “our machinery of death registration, inquests, police, criminal courts, &c.” the inquest was one of the “many securities against the violation of human life” (Jan. 14: 4). The inquest defined what counted as a natural death in “‘the ordinary course’” of things and what counted as an unnatural death. The unnatural death often implied criminal behavior. Guarding against undetected wrongdoing, these death inquiries deterred would-be criminals by demonstrating that legal inquiries will expose and punish homicides. By policing and deterring aberrant activities as well as soothing public fears and unrest based upon the rumor of an unnatural death, the inquiry preserved public order. Finally, as inquiries increasingly incorporated the postmortem examination as a means of forcing the body to speak, the 218 inquest helped establish the medical profession’s authority in the public sphere. In its most basic function, to determine the cause of death and whether somebody or something was responsible for contributing towards or causing that death, the inquest assigned blame and quieted public speculation. By policing and deterring aberrant activities as well as soothing public fears and unrest based upon the rumor of an unnatural death, the inquiry preserved public order. If somebody was at fault, the jury indicted and the law punished; if something was at fault the jury assessed a deodand, a fine charged upon the owner(s) of the incriminated object based upon the value of that object. A tool to reveal crime or bungling court through whose doors murderers escaped, the inquest could force out secrets that dead lips could not speak or could smother dead bodies’ tales. Populist coroners spoke of an ideal of the inquest’s purpose and structure: a means to expose abuses of authority, murder, and manslaughter committed by family, friends, strangers, and public officials. The citizen’s dead body could be political tool or political liability, the means to uncover or cover over crimes against the body and violations of the citizen’s rights. Hence, in the coroner’s public tribune, the dead body might serve the public. Considering the potential power of the coroner’s inquest—the power to protect, expose, and punish—it is not surprising that during the first half of the nineteenth century, the coroner’s office was the site of intense struggle: a struggle to tell a story and to carry out justice. Judicial factions battled publicly over the right to read the corpse, speak its tale, and punish when necessary; in this endeavor, each sought to silence another faction’s corpse reading. Law- and medicine-trained coroners debated over who would tell the body’s story (the witnesses speaking of social relations and activities, or the medical witnesses speaking the story wrested from dead flesh) and what sort of story 219 that would be (one framed by either criminal or medical jurisprudence). Still, they agreed upon the coroner’s duty as investigator, in the public’s behalf, of death-producing wrongs, and both fought for the independence of the office from other agents of the law—lawyers, magistrates, and their supporters—who sought to curtail the coroner’s powers to investigate, enervate his ability to punish those indicted at his court, and undermine if not abolish his independence. While coroners fiercely protected the integrity of their legal inquiry and its capacity to protect the public, in practice the inquest more often failed to hold authorities responsible for their wrongs, a failure inquest reports clearly reveal. The dead body’s tale could be quashed by bad corpse readers, jealous or critical magistrates, or complacent coroners. Telling stories about the machinery of investigation, novels offer a powerful critique of the inquest and offer a better form—the novel’s narrative. The inquest tells unsatisfactory stories, these narratives assert, failing utterly to speak for the dead or satisfy the public’s desire for a story. An inquiry weakened by its ties to the law’s bumbling structures, the inquest’s machinery was incapable of correctly interpreting, recognizing, and even discovering pertinent evidence, be it direct or circumstantial, in the endeavor to tell the corpse’s tale. The law failed to recognize what witnesses were relevant, failed to listen to witnesses who could offer potentially revealing testimony, and, worst of all, failed to recognize the dead body’s implicating testimony. Well- intentioned or purely bumbling, neither the legal nor extra-legal inquest was capable of uncovering the dead’s entire tale. Only the novel can offer all pertinent details, through testimony and circumstantial evidence gathered and presented by the narrator, necessary for the reader to piece together the tale of the dead body and render a verdict. Novels do 220 not merely expose the failure of human inquiry; they also propose a solution to the inquiry after truth—the ubiquity and omniscience of a thorough and carefully managed narrative. The inquest and the novel are rivals in the effort to narrativize death and the life that preceded it. The inquest’s purpose is to narrate a life’s end; recording death is a corollary of the novel’s purpose—recording life. In addition, both the inquest and the novel are trials. The novel’s narrative form is a mimetic one, “a full and authentic report of human experience,” and as such, Ian Watt insightfully argues in The Rise of the Novel (1957), novel readers and jurists share certain expectations: “both want to know ‘all the particulars’ of a given case—the time and place of the occurrence; both must be satisfied as to the identities of the parties concerned” (32, 31). Further exploring the novel-as-trial in Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (1992), Alexander Welsh writes that novels “treated a lifetime as a trial, or a series of trials, in which the main actor’s intention played a significant part” (44). Unlike trials in courts of law, he explains, novels can reveal for the reader’s consideration things unseen, such as motives and intent, either implied or explicitly narrated. If the novel is a trial of lives and the readers jurists—deliberating and rendering judgment based upon the circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony narratives provide—then the novel too is a trial of deaths in which the reader acts as the coroner’s jury and the narrator acts as coroner by selecting, managing, and presenting pertinent evidence. Both the novel and the inquest are trials that seek to uncover a hidden narrative. However, the inquest’s reliance on the realm of external facts, those discoverable by the testimony of witnesses and corpses, inhibits its investigation. The coroner can peer inside heads and uncover brains, but he 221 cannot likewise uncover thoughts and intention. This the novel can do. It is the inquest’s several failings that the novel exposes even as it sets itself up as the ideal mode of death investigation. The legal inquest was an important civil institution, the only one in which the public (the rate-payers) elected their own judge (the coroner) and in which the public gave the evidence (as witnesses), weighed the evidence during deliberations, and gave the verdict (as jurymen). Initially, the inquest had much less to do with the public and much more do to with the king’s financial rights. Beginning with the office’s establishment in the Middle Ages, the coroner’s primary responsibility was a financial one, ensuring “that the royal interest in certain sources of revenue [shipwrecks, fines, and forfeited property] was recorded, protected, and exploited” (Forbes 5). Convicted felons and suicides forfeited all property to the crown, objects causing death (such as badly steered ships or poorly managed tools) were subject to deodands while towns, villages, and communities were required to pay fines when they failed to deliver the murderer of a community member killed in its precincts (Burney; Cawthon; Forbes; Harvard). In his duty to the King, the coroner was responsible for investigating sudden deaths in order to determine whether foul play required payment of fine or chattels to the crown. By the nineteenth century, George Frederick Young writes in his 1830 article in The Times, “Coroner of Middlesex: To the Editor of the Times,” the centuries-old inquest came to be seen as a “judicial institution” and “one of the most cherished bulwarks of rational liberty” (4). Anybody could be a juror, and anybody could attend the inquest because of its status as an open court. The inquest had evolved into a people’s court, the value of and necessity of which populist coroners fought to establish. Representing the populist coroner’s 222 position on the role and importance of the inquest, William Payne, City Coroner of London, wrote an open letter to The Times in 1849, explaining that “the investigation by jury . . . has always been looked upon as one of the most valuable institutions of this country” and that the jury is “of far greater importance than any other [jury]” (5). Unlike other courts’ juries, the inquest’s jury must hear the evidence of both prosecutor and accused, “and they are consequently the most likely to form a correct judgment on the matter before them” (Payne 5). Secondly, “the coroner is elected by the people—he is not removable by the crown—and, before such an officer (if properly qualified), with an independent jury, in open court, justice can hardly fail to be properly administered” (Payne 5). Ideally, the inquest rendered transparent the workings of justice in the public’s behalf and with the public’s participation. During the inquest, dead bodies did tell tales. Since Edward I established the inquest by the 1276 statute de officio coronatoris (4th Edw. 6, st. 2), the “crowner’s” inquiry into death sought to articulate the tale dead lips could not utter. As the reason for the inquest’s existence, the corpse was central. It is only quite recently that murder trials can occur without the body, and even in these instances, making a case against the accused is more difficult without that vital testimony of dead flesh. Not every body was fit for the inquest in the nineteenth century. Bodies attended to in their illness by a private medical practitioner, bodies that succumbed at last to a long illness, and bodies whose survivors procure certification of the cause of death from the medical attendant—these bodies did not need to be investigated. The investigated corpse was a questionable one: the body of one who did not die in the privacy of the home, who died in public institutions, or whose death was “unnatural”—suspicious, uncertain, or sudden. Through 223 witnesses’ narratives and the dead body’s narrative spoken by the medical examiner, the corpse found a voice. The inquiry had to be triggered by a source (citizens, constables, medical officers, workhouse guardians, and medical professionals) who informed the coroner of the particular circumstances of a death, the basis upon which the coroner determined whether an inquest was necessary. The coroner then issued an inquest warrant and paid a constable to summon a jury, consisting of twelve to twenty-four men from the area in which the body was found. Normally, inquests were held in taverns, these being the only public buildings available in every village, town, and city. i After hearing the coroner summarize the case and allegations, the jury’s first duty was to view the body, which before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, lay in the dead-house of the hospital or workhouse, in the home, the public house, or some other public room for which the coroner paid rent until the inquest’s completion. The coroner most often, but not always, led the jury to view the body. Without question, as Ian Burney notes in his study of the inquest Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830-1926 (2000), “the view by both the coroner and jury was considered an inviolate feature of inquest procedure” (92). After all, without the dead body, there would be no inquest, and without the viewing, the inquest would be “unduly” (improperly) managed and quashed (the verdict voided and the fees disallowed). Equally important, the viewing was part of the public’s access to the machinery of justice. As an 1840 Lancet article proclaims, the inquest proceeded through the deliberations of “not a dozen ignorant beasts, but with twelve intelligent men, under and armed with the authority of the law, purposefully to ascertain, on view of the body, the CAUSE OF DEATH” (“Court” 934). After the jury 224 viewed the body, paid witnesses gave evidence and were questioned by both the coroner and jurymen. Next, the coroner summed up the evidence and ordered the jury to deliberate upon their verdict, either in open court or behind closed doors. It was the inquest’s purpose to investigate on behalf of the public while it was the public’s duty to participate in the investigation by viewing and coming to conclusions about the corpse. The viewing allowed the public to participate in the machinery of justice and offered a legally sanctioned excuse for staring at and conjecturing about a dead body, a pastime for which the public evidently harbored some taste. Curiosity induced people to crowd around the morgues in order to catch a glimpse of a corpse newly laid out for public consumption. Dickens admits of the Paris morgue, “I never want to go there, but I am always pulled there,” and later notes that the Parisian public was “quite ravenous to know about” the newest corpses to arrive (“Travelling Abroad” 88; “Some Recollections of Mortality” 222). The displayed dead body is an article, an inviting consumable for ravenously curious members of the public. The inquest offered a legitimate opportunity to look at the strange corpses of strangers, and yet when the public must view a body, when they were compelled not out of curiosity but out of duty as jurors, they sometimes shrank from their task. Writing on his experience as a juryman at an 1841 inquest on an infant, Dickens explains that although “There was nothing repellant about the poor piece of innocence,” and the tiny corpse “demanded a mere form of looking at,” the jurymen refuse to look (“Some Recollections of Mortality” 226). Instead, “we looked at an old pauper who was going among the coffins with a foot-rule . . . and we looked at one another; and we said the place was well white-washed anyhow; and then our conversational powers as a British Jury flagged” (Dickens, “Some Recollections of 225 Mortality” 226). When obliged to look and judge, the public in its capacity as jury would rather turn away, thus threatening to subvert the inquest’s proceedings by refusing their role as investigators. ii Nevertheless, “‘The first thing to be done is to view the body,’” Dickens’s Chancery district coroner announces to his jury, and see the body the jury must, regardless of its appearance (Dickens, Bleak House 133). The investigation subjected the dead body to a variety of gazes—the coldly calculating medical man’s eye, the investigatory peep of reporters, the supposedly unbiased look of the coroner. The jury’s flinching gaze was integral to the inquiry. Strikingly, while the jury’s opinion on the dead body is often reduced to a comment upon its emaciation, medical men provided the most lengthy descriptions of the body, descriptions framed with terminology that seems to render the corpse not so much an individual dead body very likely made horrible by some form of trauma but a collection of impersonal classifications and diagnoses. Someone’s father, mother, brother, or sister was displaced by “the lungs,” “the brain,” “the intestines,” “the pupils of the eyes,” “air passages much congealed with blood,” and so on. Published inquest reports reveal not only the “very technical” or at least very detached nature of medical witnesses’ evidence but also that death makes the body horrible. Duty obliged juries to look upon the body that was “a most disagreeable and miserable spectacle,” “little else than skin and bone,” and “in such a state of putrefaction that it was totally impossible to discover any marks of violence, it being all of a color” (Times 9 Nov. 1837: 4; Times 8 Nov. 1844: 6; Times 20 Aug. 1833: 3). Another jury, and without question it was not the only one, “when they viewed the body, found it in such an extremely offensive state, that they apprehended some danger [from contamination] in 226 performing that necessary part of their duty” (Times 29 Sept. 1830: 3). At times, the body “seemed to create a feeling of horror in the minds of all present” (Times 16 Jan 1844: 6). The inquest’s proceedings can compound the corpse’s horror when, for instance, the medical man performed the postmortem examination before the jury viewed the body. In 1846, the jury sitting upon the body of a convict from the Woolwich hulks complained “that the body was so mutilated and cut up by the surgeon that they could not come to a satisfactory conclusion,” and one juryman “urged that the body ought not to be touched until they came to view it” (Inquiry 258). Pre-inquest postmortems, delayed inquests, and disinterment for the purpose of holding an inquest guaranteed the corpse’s horrible appearance. In such cases, it was unlikely that the jury could look closely at the corpse, much less determine the cause of death, when the corpse was cut up or far advanced in decomposition. Even so, the viewing, The Times states, is “the disagreeable though necessary part of their [the jurors’] duty” (Times 8 Jan. 1836: 3; emphasis added). In some cases, viewing the body may be a useful part of the proceedings, but when the body was surgically mutilated or significantly decomposed, the viewing was a futile exercise in horror. The jury can tell no tales about such a body. It was the opinion of the people (jurists) that carried out justice by deciding whether a death was natural or unnatural and, consequently, what deaths involved liability and required punishment. At the same time, it was the opinion of the people in the form of rumors, reports, and allegations that the inquest was designed to displace by evidence, deliberation, and a fact-based verdict. In the absence of the inquest’s truth came rumor, which functioned as a powerful catalyst in instigating public unrest. Time and again, workhouse and prison inquest reports in The Times note rumor’s important role in 227 initiating an inquest, recounting allegations “that the deceased came by their deaths in consequence of neglect,” reports “that the deceased had died in consequence of ill- treatment,” rumors that death was “being attributed to the conduct of officers of the parish,” and so forth (Times 20 Jan. 1830: 3; Times 12 June 1844: 8; Times 18 Mar. 1844: 5). On several occasions, as a result of these rumors, “Great indignation was felt by the public” (Times 17 Oct. 1842: 5). Unchecked rumors and consequent indignation were potentially dangerous to public order and faith in governmental institutions. The inquest promised to uncover truth and dispense justice, and although the jury was responsible for viewing the corpse and ultimately rendering a verdict upon the cause of death, the coroner played an influential role in guiding their deliberations. It was the coroner’s responsibility to act as an arbiter of facts and justice lest rumor run unbridled, carrying away the people’s faith in government. Speaking about a rumor that an elderly pauper died from maltreatment in the Hendon Union Workhouse, Thomas Wakley (coroner for West Middlesex, founder of The Lancet, and MP for Finsbury) warns, “it is quite clear that, if allegations of this kind got forth without inquiries being instituted . . . the poor would very soon believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that the inquest afforded them no protection whatever” (Notes 1). The coroner, therefore, must “go fully and completely into the investigation, which can only have the development of the truth and the public good for its object” (Notes 42). Without the coroner’s diligence, the downtrodden public, particularly the poor, might lose faith in the systems that are supposed to guard them. Thus the coroner safeguarded public order. Countering the undisciplined narratives based upon conjecture and rumor, the coroner determined what “truths” would provide the evidentiary basis upon which the jury inferred the dead body’s 228 tale and rendered their verdict. By choosing and discarding witnesses according to his understanding of what constituted evidence, the coroner determined the legal inquiry’s mode of functioning and shaped the jury’s understanding of the case. Finally, in his summation preceding the jury’s deliberation and verdict, the coroner chose what evidence to provide and how to represent that evidence. It was upon the viewing in conjunction with the coroner’s chosen evidence and summation that the jury decided their verdict. In Britain, coroners’ skills for the early part of the nineteenth century consisted of two sets—legal (historically the most dominant) and medical (beginning late in the second decade of the nineteenth century). These two skills provided significantly different models of uncovering and narrating the corpse’s tale, for in choosing relevant evidence and pertinent witnesses, the coroner chose who would tell the body’s story and in what manner. Both knowledge frameworks could uncover evidence and provided the interpretive tools to read and assemble a narrative for the corpse, but the type of evidence and corpse readings produced differed. The struggle for control of the coronership during the late 1820s and through to the 1840s occurred between those who believed it to be the realm of criminal jurisprudence best served by representatives of the law and those who argued that the inquest was a medico-legal inquiry properly conducted in the realm of medical jurisprudence. In England, reading the cause of death through a medical lens emerged only during the first decades of the nineteenth century, but looking to the dead body for testimony can be seen as an extension of the ancient belief that a body would bleed in the presence of its murderer, literally testifying in blood for blood spilt. In her study on the 229 use of torture in early modern courts of law, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (2001), historian Lisa Silverman writes, Out of the sense that the spirit of the victim might accuse the murderer through bodily signs, speaking voicelessly, grew the beginnings of forensic medicine. Even if bodies could not accuse their murderers directly . . . they could be examined for the clues they offered as to the murderer’s identity. (62) Therefore, looking to the testimony of dead flesh was a practice both ancient and radical. While medical knowledge was increasingly accepted as an important part of the inquest, the extent to which such knowledge would guide the inquiry was under bitter contestation. Crucial in forcing acceptance of the inquest as a medico-legal inquiry was Thomas Wakley’s 1836 Medical Witnesses Act, previous to which there was no remuneration to medical practitioners acting as witnesses or performing a postmortem. This Act suggested that the medical man’s function in the inquest had become sufficiently important to warrant set remuneration for his services and indicated that medical men had become sufficiently powerful to acquire such payment after having complained for decades about its absence. Ideally, with a specially trained eye and knowledge that enabled him to see and decipher what the general public cannot—to discern, as Wakley puts it, “precisely and positively, what was the cause of death in order that there might be no doubt whatever with reference to what that cause had been”—the medical witness interpreted and conveyed the corpse’s testimony with precision and certainty (Notes 1). iii Guaranteeing the medical man as witness or coroner a public forum in which to demonstrate his skills, the inquest helped to cement medical authority and thus aided in the rise of the medical profession as a powerful arbiter of proper (sanitary and moral) behavior. 230 Over dead bodies, the medical and legal coroners battled for the right to determine how the story of life extinguished should emerge. For each type of coroner, the specialized knowledge his training provided was the only means by which the inquiry would produce the correct story. One man’s expertise was another man’s rumor. While the legal coroner viewed the inquest as a place for criminal jurisprudence, the medical coroner advocated the inquest’s status as a court of medical jurisprudence. Both law- and medicine-trained coroners evaluated and chose evidence, but according to the argument’s factions, the legal coroner privileged the testimony of living witnesses while the medical coroner favored the testimony of dead flesh. The law-trained coroner winkled out and deciphered pertinent facts from witnesses’ life-history narratives. Such evidence would refer to day-to-day living and social interaction rather than a cataloging of corporeal signs. In contrast, the medical coroner did not require hours of possibly useless narratives about the dead person’s way of life because the corpse told its secrets in a language only a medical expert trained in pathology could perceive and understand. Postmortem examinations provided more pertinent evidence than survivors’ stories, this coroner might argue. Furthermore, while the law-trained coroner might accept his medical witness’s report unquestioningly, the medical coroner could identify and discard bad medical evidence. There was more at stake here than the right way to produce the dead body’s narrative, for in the act of narration, the coroner and his jury also categorized the death as natural or unnatural, the latter of which required punishment. The wrong mode of gathering and interpreting evidence and inferring a narrative potentially resulted in not just bad readings but the criminal’s escape from punishment, which in turn encouraged 231 more crime. For each type of coroner, guiding the inquiry by the other knowledge smothered the corpse’s tale, producing injustice rather than justice. Advocates of the law-trained coroner argued that medicine was neither a fit basis for an inquest nor a fit qualification for a coroner. First, lacking legal training, medical men are incapable of weighing the evidence and instructing the jury. A correspondent of The Times in 1830 declares that a coroner must have “knowledge of the laws of evidence,” requisite in the performance of his duty (“Coroner for Middlesex” 4). He must be capable of “compelling the attendance of competent evidence, to the presentation of the facts as elicited from the examination of witnesses impartially to the jury, guiding them only on points of law” (“Coroner for Middlesex” 4; emphasis added). A medical man, William Baker warns during his 1830 campaign to be elected coroner of East Middlesex, “would solely point their [the jury’s] attention to the evidence of medical men” (“Election of Coroner for the County of Middlesex” 4). Secondly, medical men have their own objectives apart from those of the inquest—namely, asserting their own scientific opinions over the opinions of other medical witnesses. Thirdly, such obsession with their own theories—an error in judgment from which all medical men apparently suffer, according to law-trained coroners’ supporters—would render any medical man a biased judge, for “[h]e will draw the attention of the jury from the plain and straight forward investigation of facts, into the labyrinths of his own scientific inquiries” (Young 4). Rather than aiding the search for the cause of death and potential liability or criminal wrongdoing, a biased judge would only bring interference and confusion. Under such guidance, the country would find “its inquest rooms converted into dissecting theatres, and into arenas for the unseemly display of scientific contention” (Young 4). Far from 232 enlightening the jury, this sort of inquest management would inhibit a jury’s ability to render an appropriate verdict. The medical coroner would be a bad narrator. His inquiry would stifle the dead body’s truth. “If ‘law’ be necessary in a Coroner, let the public be reminded that ‘law’ is not of one kind only,” an 1840 Lancet article declares. Advocates of law-trained coroners disparaged the medical man’s abilities to navigate the complexities of the law whereas advocates of the medical coroner and medical witness devalued the abilities of legal coroners and the complexity of the law. In 1828, Wakley argued that “‘Any man of ordinary understanding,’” by reading the de officio coronatoris statute and serving as witness or juryman “at a few trials so as to acquire some general information as to the common rules of evidence is competent, as far as legal qualifications are concerned, to discharge the duties of the office of coroner’” (Wakley qtd. in Sprigge 355-56). Inquest law required no special training in order to comprehend it, Wakley asserts, and goes on to claim, somewhat perplexingly, that “[t]he laws of physiology, . . . in their study, educate the mind for the very business of all law” (“Court” 934). Not only does the study of medicine enable the medical man to understand complicated jurisprudence (so complicated in fact that according to inquest historian Elisabeth Cawthon, by the 1840s even law-trained coroners began to struggle to navigate the requirements of British courts), he attacks any value the law holds for the coroner: The training of the mind to act for the law, and to fulfil all its injunctions in the court of the Coroner, is not to be effected in the red-and-black-ink shops of scribbling and miserable-minded attorneys; but in . . . the Temples of Medical Science. (“Court” 934-935) 233 Finally, Wakley presents more serious complaints about the inquest’s ability to identify crime when the law arbitrates where medicine should direct. When electing the county coroner, a Lancet article explains, electors determine “who is to stand between them and the murders who . . . execute their victims” (“Court” 934). Consequently, “The want of accurate and searching examination [of the body] . . . holds out a strong inducement to the robber to become a murderer,” by allowing him “easily [to] evade the flimsy pretext of a coroner’s inquest . . . and thus he is taught that his surest protection will be found in adding murder to theft’” (“Court” 934). The legal coroner is a bad narrator because he cannot read dead flesh, which provides the most trustworthy testimony. Only the medical coroner, Wakley and his journal argue, see justice done by properly interpreting the evidence in dead flesh and inferring a narrative that forms the corpse’s testimony. Medical and legal coroners thus accused one another of gathering unimportant evidence, serving flawed readings of that evidence, and leading the juries to inaccurate and unjust verdicts. iv By the 1850s, it seems that most coroners and their advocates accepted the value of medical knowledge in the law’s machinery of death investigation. Legal coroners openly advocated the value of medical evidence, and medical coroners spoke of themselves as judicial officers. Despite their differences regarding the proper mode of directing the inquiry, medical and legal coroners agreed upon the principal purpose of the inquest—to uncover crimes against body and life. A dead body was a sign of negligent or criminal behavior, and it was the coroner’s duty, as an agent of the inquest, to uncover the persons responsible for that body’s state. Under the coroner’s guidance, the inquest uncovered the true tales of the corpse. He established the principles guaranteeing that the 234 truth will out—that the wronged body will be identified and that such a body will speak, that crimes will be punished, and punishment will deter further criminal behavior. The inquest deters, William Baker explains, because “the moral effect of the certainty of inquiry, in all such cases . . . operates as the most salutary check upon crime and profligacy” (76). “[T]he retributive justice of the law” thus protects the public’s welfare and maintains public order (Baker 44). The coroner policed public behavior, uncovering and punishing death-producing criminality—be it the direct modes of murder and manslaughter or the indirect mode of neglect. However, it was not only the murderer who shot, stabbed, throttled, and poisoned the living body into death whom the coroner pursued. He also was responsible for investigating the neglected corpse, thereby exposing the “criminal responsibility of all persons who are by law bound to maintain their children, relatives, apprentices, and other dependents” but who failed to do so (Baker 176). Besides carrying out justice by punishing wrongdoers, the coroner guaranteed the continued proper working of regulations designed to protect life. He ensured that responsible parties adhered to law and regulations by investigating accidents and seeking out any negligence on the part of those operating or managing new transportation technologies, such as boiler operators, captains, boatmen, and railroad officers. Hence, Baker proclaims, “how salutary is it for the preservation of human life, that he [the coroner] should be constantly in a state of vigilance” (6). Lastly, the coroner did not merely expose wrongs but could also work to rectify those ills. As Baker notes, “‘in many cases where it has been proved that blame has existed by means of an inquisition the evil has been remedied’” (2-3). Then, while administering the law, the coroner’s inquiry also had possessed the potential to change the law—to “develop the mode of 235 government,” as Wakley sees it—to a more humane course (Notes 42). Out of inhumanity comes humanity, a transformation over which the coroner presides. Ultimately, a diligent coroner protected the living by investigating the dead. As a tool of retributive and corrective justice, the inquest made the corpse a political tool because the body could be the means of uncovering excessive discipline or unlawful neglect on the part of those responsible for the public welfare. As guardians of the law, coroners investigated and prosecuted other government officers. Baker writes that “it becomes the duty of coroners to [investigate] . . . wherever death may be discovered to have been preventable or caused by a breach or neglect of any the important duties” set forth by various boards and officials to be carried out by relieving officers, workhouse masters, boards of guardians, and other local officials responsible for the welfare of the public (114). The found pauper body—emaciated, diseased, and vermin-ridden—signified the failure of the Poor Law’s agents to fulfill their duties and, as such, represented an affront to the law. Similarly, the body brought down into a horrible death by preventable disease potentially pointed to government agents’ neglect. It is both “very beneficial and well worth the expense,” Baker argues, to inquire “into the causes or immediate antecedents of death . . . for the sake of public information as to the means of preventing disease and mortality,” even if such inquiries set different government offices against one another (81). In the summer of 1848, during a cholera epidemic, Reverend G. R. Harding of Keynsham Union refused to bury the corpses of five people who had died of cholera until the coroner held inquests on those bodies, despite the disapprobation of the union’s board of guardians and its medical officers. In 236 response, the assistant secretary of the General Board of Health notes that deaths from preventable diseases, and the prevention of which may have been charged as a special duty on some particular officer or officers, implies a probable culpability . . . and therefore forms a proper subject of legal investigation, especially when the deaths in question have happened among . . . any class under the charge of a public body responsible for their proper treatment. (Baker 581) The coroner, then, stood between not only the murderer and the murdered but also the negligent governmental official and the bodies under the government’s care. In policing agents of governmental institutions responsible for society’s unproductive citizens, the coroner claimed that he protected the public against abuses and ensured that justice will be available to every body. If the coroner was responsible for guarding public welfare against the tyranny of excessive discipline, it was precisely in the hidden corners bounded by discipline—the prison, the workhouse, and the asylum—that it was of the utmost importance to investigate. Those least ideal social bodies thus became the most ideal bodies upon which the inquest must work in order to protect all bodies, productive and unproductive alike. The workhouse guardians and masters were placed in authority over paupers, prison officials were placed in authority over convicts, and over both sat the coroner. “[N]o criminal,” Wakley states to a jury, whatever his crime or offence may be . . . cannot die in gaol without an inquest being held on his body, for the purpose of ascertaining if he died in the due course of nature; and for the purpose of ascertaining whether those who had been placed in authority over him, had exceeded their authority, and had by exceeding it produced his death. (Notes 1) Like the convict, the pauper lacked the power to speak for or protect himself nor could the press penetrate the workhouse walls to expose governmental agents’ treatment of pauper bodies to the public’s judgment. Consequently, the coroner acted as the public’s 237 proxy by penetrating the workhouse walls and exposing any wrongdoing as well as instances where the union neglected its duty to paupers outside of workhouses. Investigation of the pauper corpse was a matter of national importance because the inquest affects, in fact, every man, woman, and child in England . . . because it concerns the law as it affects millions of people; as it affects the power which can be exercised by persons placed in authority in the workhouse; and as it affects persons who are placed in subjection in the workhouses. There is no knowing who may become the inmate of a workhouse; and therefore I said it affects us all. (Notes 11) By serving the pauper body, the coroner served every body, for any body may be a pauper body. The coroner’s untrammeled discretion to choose upon what bodies he would hold an inquest and the manner in which he conducted his court was a prerogative other governmental officials challenged. As coroners expanded their investigatory principles to encompass alleged deaths by neglect and sudden deaths (which although originally part of the coroner’s field of inquiry, had been hotly debated for at least a century), agents of the law actively sought to curtail the coroner’s powers to identify wrongs and ensure justice was done. The coroners investigated bodies that did not display explicit signs of an unnatural death; these bodies did not need the inquest to speak for them, critics complained. Magistrates headed the attack on the coroner’s powers and jurisdiction, specifically the coroner’s right to investigate certain corpses, call medical witnesses (who received remuneration for their testimony), and punish those indicted in their courts. v By the beginning of the nineteenth century, justices of the peace denied coroners’ fees on inquests they deemed unnecessary, discharged people indicted in coroners’ courts instead 238 of imprisoning them, directed parish officers to cease reporting sudden deaths to coroners, disallowed payment on inquests whose juries’ verdicts reported death by natural causes, denied payment for inquests held in workhouses, and sometimes countenanced the parish officials’ disrupting inquest proceedings by denying the coroner access to the body (Baker; Forbes; Harvard; Sprigge). The proponents of curtailing the coroner’s discretion to choose upon what bodies he would hold an inquest and when he would call and pay one or more medical witnesses argued that the coroner’s independence permitted him to hold an excessive number of inquests in order to procure the fees, a financial concern shared by some of the public and papers, such as The Times, which would reverse its stance in the late 1840s. In response, the coroners reframed the argument as a struggle over the integrity of the coroner’s office and the ability to narrate the dead body’s tale. Magistrates’ “attempts to contravene the ordinary course of justice,” Baker warns, are “fraught with the greatest possible evil” because by hindering inquiry into causes of death, magistrates allowed “the murderers to escape the retributive justice of the law,” which would in turn promote a proliferation of murder (Baker 381, 44). Moreover, as a judicial officer and equal of the magistrate, the coroner “ought not to be fettered . . . by individuals on whose conduct he may be called to adjudicate” (10). In other words, when the coroner’s independence is abolished, those subjected to the magistrates’ power (such as paupers and convicts) lose their protections against wrongful and excessive exertion of authority over their bodies. Even worse, by stifling the coroner’s powers of investigation, the magistrates would ensure that the dead body will never speak, nor will it receive due justice. 239 Coroners’ concerns about magistrates’ attempts to stifle their inquiries were not unfounded. At times, magistrates seemed even to seek to silence the corpse in order to secure their own reputation against the inquiry’s accusation of wrongdoing. After relating a couple of examples wherein the neglect of a workhouse governor and magistrates resulted in death and severe injury of bodies under their care, Wakley concludes, “In the performance of my duty . . . I might have given great offence to those magistrates whose neglect was thus brought under view” (Report from the Select Committee on the Office 114). Even in his first year as coroner of West Middlesex, Wakley did indeed give “great offence” to a particular Middlesex magistrate by investigating the death of Thomas Austin, a workhouse inmate who died after having fallen into a laundry copper full of boiling water. Even before Austin died, the Middlesex magistrates decided against informing the coroner, thereby impinging upon the coroner’s prerogative to decide whether or not to hold an inquiry. Austin’s case precisely exemplifies the sort of abuse or neglect that Wakley claimed the coroner’s office was meant to expose as well as the judicial breakdown Baker, Payne, and Wakley warned would occur when the magistrates interfered with investigation: namely, that magistrates would direct inquiry away from cases that might implicate them. The Reverend Theodore Williams, Middlesex magistrate and member of the board of guardians of the workhouse in which Austin died, actively sought to block Wakley’s inquest. Williams “denied the ‘necessity’ of an inquest on the body of Austin,” buried Austin’s body before Wakley could hold an inquest but after he issued an inquest warrant (an action that fifty years later would be a misdemeanor), ignored the two successive warrants requesting the disinterment of Austin’s body (which forced Wakley to have the body disinterred himself), and moved to declare the inquest 240 unnecessary and deny Wakley’s fees in that case. Clearly, coroners’ talk of protecting the poor against abuses of authority corresponded to a real and serious duty. Magistrates and Poor Law authorities sought to discipline the pauper’s body while the coroner sought to protect it by disciplining local government. Without independence, the coroner most certainly would have been subject to the discretion of magistrates and parish officials who would no doubt have avoided incriminating themselves by permitting investigation of the deaths of those under their care. Wakley here used the inquest to expose such a possibility and illustrate how the diligent coroner, insisting upon his own independence and discretion, protected the public by insisting upon seeking out the corpse’s story. Coroners spoke often and vociferously about justice as a principle of the inquest, but they did not always adhere to that principle. For all of Wakley’s machinations and speechifying upon the coroner’s duty to uncover and rectify wrongs, the jury’s verdict for Austin’s inquest reads “‘Accidental death’” without a rider implying blame or misconduct. It is true that the jury for Wakley’s 1841 case on James Lisney declared his death to be “‘caused by an imprisonment in the gaol room [of the Hendon Workhouse] . . . and the jury beg to express their opinion, that is was not humane to imprison him without fire and on a low diet” (Notes 46). In Mrs. Friry’s case—which The Times called “[a]nother of those lamentable cases of death from the New Poor Law, which ought to strike horror and remorse into every mind”—the jury chided, “‘We find that Elizabeth Friry died from fever brought on by the want of food and sufficient nourishment; and that the jury cannot separate without expressing their disapprobation of the conduct of the relieving office and of the surgeon’” (“Another of Those Lamentable Cases” 1). On the basis of this latter case, one in which the union medical officer refused to treat Mrs. Friry 241 because she lacked an order from the relieving officer who refused to give her one, The Times declares, “We say, death from the New Poor Law; it is a plainer and less circuitous phrase than ‘fever brought on by the want of food and sufficient nourishment’” (Times 6 Nov. 1840: 1). These incriminating verdicts and accompanying observations that damned the Poor Law Amendment Act and its agents did not occur frequently, and while they did expose abuses to public, these reports also point to the limitations of the inquest’s availability to the public. The inquest’s power to inform the public was, and still is, dependent upon publicity. The inquest can bring to the public’s notice any wrongdoing exposed in the coroner’s court, but such power is dependent upon the newspapers’ willingness to report inquests and the extent to which they are willing to provide an extended report, including evidence rather than a simple name, place, and verdict. Between 1829 and 1850, there were approximately 1,348 reports in The Times upon inquests of suicides; in contrast, during the same period, it appears that there were not many more than seventy-one reported inquests upon paupers (whereas in 1835 alone there were seventy-one reports upon suicide inquests) and sixty-two inquests on starvation deaths. It is probable that there were more suicide inquests than pauper inquests, but at the same time there were undoubtedly more than seventy-one inquests upon pauper deaths through a twenty-one year period. Of cases in which agents refused relief and the applicant subsequently died of need, The Medical Gazette wisely points out that “cases of this sort reported in newspapers form, of course, but a small fraction of those actually occurring . . . In plain English, there is no doubt that most of these cases are hushed up” (qtd. in Times 31 Jan. 1838: 6). Perhaps suicides, with their potential for revealing highly emotional and titillating narratives of personal and pecuniary ruination 242 or thwarted love, were of far greater interest to the public than deaths by starvation, which promised primarily dreary tales of the needs and failures of unimportant and uninteresting people who at times lacked histories and names. In fact, reports upon suicide inquests generally are often longer and contain more witness narrative as well as coroners’ speeches and jury’s comments than reports upon convict and pauper inquests. The inconstant availability of reports upon inquests’ evidence of abuses demonstrated the limit on the populist coroner’s ability to fulfill his promises to inform and protect the public. Even worse, many of those pauper inquests published during this time period do not uphold the populist coroners’ idealistic notions of what the inquest, the coroner, and the jury can do to reveal abuses of authority to the public and help rectify those abuses. Out of seventy-one pauper inquests surveyed, sixty-two obviously were starvation cases, but of those inquests, less than half of the verdicts (twenty-six) list starvation or need as the cause of death while twenty-five attribute the death to variations of “natural causes” or “by the visitation of God.” The Poor Law and its agents were responsible for the deaths in at least forty of those cases: twenty-two of the deceased were denied relief and twelve had refused to get relief, which implicates the conditions of less eligibility and the stigma surrounding the workhouse. Explaining the reluctance to get relief, a juror in one of these cases declared, “We all know that there are many more poor persons who would really die of starvation rather than go into a parish workhouse, particularly as they are at present regulated under the poor law,” and Wakley similarly but more dramatically proclaims that “Workhouses, since the passing of the New Poor Law Act, had become as much dreaded as the inquisition was in Spain” (Times 19 April 1837: 6; Times 27 Feb. 1841: 6). Despite the evidence against the poor law’s agents, only 243 eleven inquest verdicts included a rider placing blame upon the union medical officer or the relieving officer. The two most popular verdicts, “natural death” and “by the visitation of God” or variations thereof apparently functioned as interchangeable terms that simply indicated that the body’s death was an organic one, a death generated from within, even when there were decidedly external causes or contributing factors. In one instance, a pauper woman seized by illness and severe vomiting was refused medical care by the work-house nurse, who tormented the woman by tying up her jaws and tying together her legs, pushing sheets into her face, and pinching her nose shut so that she could not breathe. Despite all this, because the medical men “could not account for [the cause of] her death,” the jury’s verdict read “‘that the deceased died by the visitation of God’” (Times 20 April 1831: 4). A boy in the Norwood House of Industry died four days after a severe beating; the body “bore evident marks of blows, the back, thighs, legs, and arms being nearly covered with black marks, there was also a bruise on the forehead,” and the medical witness discovered buckle marks on the boy’s hips (“Coroner’s Inquest at Norwood” 7). After the postmortem examination, the union medical officer reported finding “disease of the lungs sufficient to cause death within a short period” and concluded that the beatings “would have caused much constitutional disturbance, but would not of themselves have caused death” (“Coroner’s Inquest at Norwood” 7). On the basis of the medical witness’s evidence, the jury concluded “‘That the deceased died of disease of the lungs’” (“Coroner’s Inquest at Norwood” 7). According to the medical man and the jury, the boy, like most of these other paupers, was going to die anyway. There may be a proximate cause—an action but for which the death would not have occurred at that time—but 244 juries did not consistently identify proximate cause in their verdicts. If there was eventual death written in the body, even if there were other factors that may have directly contributed to or even caused the death, then that death was a natural one—a death without blame. It does not matter whether that death came sooner or later. After all, the pauper body is merely one that uses resources, and there is nothing lost when an unproductive body ends its run sooner than it might have. Another highly controversial area of the coroner’s investigation was the penitentiary, and like the pauper inquest, the prison inquest was supposed to “[assure] the people that nobody, however humble, can die ‘like a dog,’ that a violent death will be accounted for . . . and that the true reason for death will be discovered” (“The Uses of Inquests” 79). If, as The Times declares in reference to Northleach prison, “persons who enter the prison in a robust state of health, leave it emaciated, diseased, and unfit for labour,” and some of those bodies die, it was the coroner’s duty fully to investigate the emaciated corpses of prisoners and the jury’s duty to render a verdict implicating if not the authorities, at least excessive prison discipline (“Prison Discipline” 3). In investigating, Wakley explains, the coroner may invite the magistrates in order that, having heard the evidence, they might adopt such steps as should lead to the correction of any evil which might be found to be in existence with reference to the conduct of the affairs of the gaol and treatment of the prisoners. (“Prison Discipline. The House Of Correction” 6) The prison inquest, like other inquests, is a promise to protect living prisoners, revealing malfunctions in prison discipline and ensuring their correction, by investigating dead prisoners. Unlike the pauper inquest, in the penitentiary inquest there was no battle over when the coroner should or could investigate dead bodies since inquests upon deaths in 245 custody had been mandatory since the Middle Ages. Unhampered by meddling magistrates or government officials, the prison inquest still failed to investigate prison deaths consistently and diligently. Ideally, by investigating all prison deaths and informing the public of any abuse by state authority occurring in houses of correction, the inquest should protect those subjected to the law’s punishment and under the law’s protection. In practice, conducting the inquest as a mere matter of course, coroners and their juries sometimes displayed a lack of interest in uncovering the direct and indirect causes of an inmate’s death. Admittedly, because they were mandatory in every case, prison inquests lacked the urgent impetus of suspicious circumstances that spurred many inquiries. Secondly, as Michael Ignatieff clearly establishes in A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (1978), the new penitentiary system often was under attack, so implicating prison officials in prisoners’ deaths was potentially inflammatory. Consequently, Scranton and Chadwick affirm in their book, In the Arms of the Law: Coroner’s Inquests and Deaths in Custody (1987), “the political weight of the coroner’s office was placed firmly behind the interests of the state institutions” (33). Inquest verdicts demonstrate this unfortunate political influence that defanged the inquiry on a fairly consistent basis. The degree of indifference to the deaths of prisoners explicitly counters coroners’ proclamations on the inquest’s social and political purposes (protecting the public and urging greater humanity in the law) and the most basic principle of the postmortem inquiry (determining the cause of death). In his study, “A Mortality Record for Coldbath Fields Prison, London, in 1795-1829,” Thomas Forbes reveals “an apparent lack of interest in determining why prisoners died” on the part of 246 coroners and their juries (668). This method of not recording the cause of death seems to have continued, if inquest reports in The Times are representative of British prison inquests during that period of time. Between 1829 and 1850, out of eighty-eight prison inquests reported in The Times, seventy-eight produced vague verdicts that say nothing about a cause of death or potential liability: fifty-six of “natural death,” eighteen “by the visitation of God,” two by “natural death by the visitation of God,” one by “general debility,” and one by “decay of nature.” Only five indicate a specific medical diagnosis of the cause of death. While the reports of thirty-one inquests include medical witnesses’ evidence that name a specific medical cause of death, the jury still returned either “natural causes” or “by the visitation of God.” Juries seem to hand out these verdicts indiscriminately in cases of starvation, contagious disease, badly treated illnesses, and illnesses arising from bad treatment. When juries did prod prison governors about prisoners’ treatment—and in such cases prison officers returned absurd replies, such as when Millbank’s governor claims that sixteen-year-old Thomas Goode “‘died from the good living he received’” at the prison—they rarely included a rebuke or notice of mistreatment in their verdicts. vi The jury of the 1827 inquest on J. P. Devendish, who died in Fleet prison, expressed regret that the prison lacked a medical man and yet served a verdict of “‘Died by the visitation of God; and that no blame whatever is to be attached either to the warden (Mr. Brown) or to any other person connected with the establishment’” (Times 1 Mar. 1827: 5). The verdict for Thomas Goode, who died of gaol fever at Millbank in 1836, reads, “‘Died by the visitation of God’” despite the jury’s notice upon viewing the body that “with the exception of an unhealthy puffiness about the face, [it] presented a very emaciated 247 appearance” (Times 3 Dec. 1836: 5). As historians of prisons and medical practice Joe Sim and Tony Ward write, verdicts of this sort reveal that inquests behind penitentiary walls “rarely criticized institutional policies” (246). From time to time, the jury expressed concern over prison discipline and implied liability without overtly stating such in the verdict itself. One jury declared a man died a “‘Natural Death,’” even while “‘at the same time the jury respectfully wish to represent that they think the complaint of which he died may have been produced by the allowance of food being too scanty, in which opinion they are uninimous [sic]’” (Times 9 Dec 1837: 7). For the most part, the verdicts of prison inquests come woefully short of reflecting the evidence of mistreatment and excessive discipline. These inquests demonstrate how not to investigate the cause of death. An investigation of a particular penal institution—the hulks—reveals the extent to which the prison inquest was a substandard one that did nothing to expose officials’ wrongdoing or protect living prisoners. In 1847, a commission investigated the abuses perpetrated by local authorities in response to allegations made in The Times about the prison medical officer’s mistreatment of sick inmates and convicts’ corpses. The Inquiry into General Treatment and Condition of Convicts in Hulks at Woolwich reveals the coroner’s lack of interest in fully inquiring into prisoner deaths and his indifference to the medical officers’ mistreatment of living or dead bodies. Whereas outspoken populist advocates of inquest reform declare the inquest must satisfy the paupers and convicts whose dead are under investigation, Carttar, the coroner responsible for the Woolwich prison hulks, tells the committee “I deemed it my duty to satisfy myself” and thus “The inquiry is made to satisfy myself and the jury, and verdict is returned accordingly” 248 (Inquiry 156, 255). Carttar fails to express any interest in the convicts’ feelings on the inquests, the deaths, or the postmortem examinations. He testifies that his inquest proceedings on convict bodies are “Precisely the same” as they are for that of any free person, and yet he repeatedly demonstrates that he does not treat convict inquests the same as he does the inquests of non-incarcerated bodies; for instance, the reports upon the pauper inquests he directed clearly show that he was an otherwise-diligent coroner. The most objectionable aspect of the Woolwich prison inquests is the coroner’s full dependence upon a medical witness. In 1838, Queen’s Coroner LePipre called a jury “composed of 12 of the most respectable prisoners,” most likely debtors, for an inquest upon Susannah Priggett who died in Queen’s Bench Prison; in 1841 London’s City Coroner, Payne, called prisoners as witnesses when inquiring into deaths occurring in Fleet Prison; Wakley too called prisoners as witnesses in his inquiry on deaths at Coldbath-Fields Prison and Pentonville. However, in 1847 Carttar admits he never called prisoners as witnesses. In addition, the committee’s report declares that Carttar has on very few occasions called any of the superior officers of the establishment, his inquiry being almost exclusively restricted the medical testimony only, it being the medical officer only who can state the nature of the case, from the patient having been so long under his care. (Inquiry xxvi) The problem is not that medical testimony was most often the sole evidence upon which the jury deliberated; rather, in asking the hulks’ medical officer (who, according to later evidence, neglected his prison job in order to cultivate his lucrative private practice) to perform the postmortem examination and act as medical witness, the coroner places the interpretation of convict corpses’ causes of death in the hands of the very man whose judgment was most certainly being questioned. 249 Reform-minded coroners declared the medical man’s evidence crucial to determining the cause of death, but even the most vocal of advocates for medical witnesses conceded that the medical witness must be a disinterested one—certainly neither the union medical officer nor the prison medical officer need apply, particularly the latter. The story of the prison inquest is not, Sim and Ward explain, “a story of enlightened doctors furthering the cause of progress in the teeth of opposition from benighted lawyers and magistrates” (262). For one, prison doctors were responsible for some of the penitentiary deaths. Death resulted from medical officers’ experiments upon inmates—which resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of cases of severe illness, of which Millbank’s 1823 typhus outbreak is an appalling example—in the search for the diet that returned the minimal amount of health for the minimal amount of food (Priestly; Ignatieff). Secondly, doctors were responsible for discouraging inmate use of the infirmary, even going so far as to punish inmates purporting to be ill by putting them on bread and water diets, restricted gruel-only diets, dunking them in cold water, using electrocution, and other salutary methods of rooting out fakery. Along these lines, the Woolwich report clearly explains the committee’s misgivings about the coroner’s trust in the medical officer’s evidence, for had the convict experienced any ill-treatment or neglect while in hospital, the medical officer would have been responsible therefore, and it is not very likely that he would criminate himself in the character of a witness to his own acts. (Inquiry xxvi) Consequently, “the medical officer of the establishment would possibly be the very last person who ought to be entrusted with this duty” (Inquiry xxvi). vii By no means was Woolwich the only prison that habitually depended upon the evidence of its own medical 250 officer: also implicated in such practices during the 1820s to the 1850s are Coldbath- Fields, Millbank, Newgate, Queen’s Bench Prison, Whitecross-street, and more likely than not the greater number of England’s penal institutions. Notably, even Thomas Wakley in 1844 allowed Coldbath-Fields’s medical officer, Mr. Wakefield, to perform the postmortem and give evidence, although he also called two additional medical witnesses who offered the same diagnosis. Enlightened doctors did not join hands with diligent coroners in order to serve as sentinels for the incarcerated. Rather, indifferent coroners joined with self-interested medical officers in order to guide the jury towards declaring “natural death” or death “by the visitation by God.” The indifferent coroner failed to remain diligent, failed to ensure the disinterestedness of his witnesses, and, above all, failed to serve the public. Here, the convict’s body is stared at, prodded, dissected, and discussed, but no one listens to its story. No one cares except other convicts whose presence at the inquest the coroner denied. Even when properly conducted, the inquest was not welcomed by all members of the public. The inquest was at the least an emotionally wracking experience for the survivors, at the worst an insult, and the postmortem examination a desecration. A correspondent of The Times in 1839 remarks that “The loss of one’s relations is distressing enough in itself without . . . an additional harrowing of the feelings by the coroner’s inquest, and, perhaps, the application of the knife” (5 Oct. 1839). An article in the Morning Advertiser similarly cries out, “we protest against intrusion on family privacy, or the body of the deceased being exposed to the ordeal of the scalpel” (17 Oct. 1839). “[N]othing would tend more to excite the public feeling against the general practice of inquests,” a Morning Herald article adds, “than unnecessary inquests and 251 postmortem examinations (11 Oct. 1839). The postmortem examination insulted the bereaved because it defiled the corpse’s integrity and cast doubt upon the death and suspicion upon the family. Further troubling the public’s view of the inquest was the practice of using the proceeding as a mode of punishment when, for instance, the poor failed to call upon a medical practitioner sufficiently early during an illness to afford any aid to the sick, who would then die without or despite medical attention. Such deaths were suspicious precisely because the dying were “neglected,” having had no licensed medical treatment. Some critics of the poor’s manner of behaving, such as a medical officer speaking at an 1840 inquest on a pauper’s death, openly declared that those who waited until a person was nearly dead before calling a medical man “‘do not care about the sick until they are at the last gasp, and then they want to throw them on the parish’” (“Another of Those Lamentable Cases” 1). Such people, it is implied, are in part responsible for the person’s death. In these cases, a coroner was sometimes called upon to hold an inquest upon the body, thereby policing and punishing unacceptable medical habits of the poor through investigation that exposed the survivors to the suspicions and gossip of the community. By thus enforcing the necessity of a medical man’s treatment of the ill, the inquest further contributed to the growing influence and power of the medical profession in the regulation of the public’s behavior. Also refusing to concur with the coroners’ idealistic notions of the inquest’s power, novels criticize the investigation’s impact upon the community and its poor performance in fulfilling its supposed functions. In novels, inquests fail, regardless of what training the coroner possesses. What is more, far from valuing the inquiry as a protection, respectable British citizens view the inquest as a marker of shame. In this line, 252 characters declare that the respectable corpse should not be subjected to an inquiry, which implies that the inquest is only for certain corpses of certain less respectable families. After having lost her mother, Margaret Hale in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) also loses her father, who dies in his sleep at his friend Mr. Bell’s house. The servant, finding the dead body in bed, suggests to his master that they inform the coroner. Angrily, Mr. Bell demands, “‘A coroner’s inquest? Pooh. You don’t think I poisoned him! Dr. Forbes says it is just the natural end of a heart complaint’” (Gaskell, North and South 318). The inquest, then, is not for the sudden death but the suspicious one. To allow an inquest implies culpability, which threatens to stain the survivors with allegations or suspicion of murder or neglect. Even years after an inquest, the investigation can threaten the respectability of innocent survivors. Sir John Chester of Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841) disapproves of his son Edward’s ardent attachment to Emma Haredale, niece of a Catholic and daughter of a murdered man. “‘The very idea of marrying a girl whose father was killed, like meat! Good God, Ned. How disagreeable!’” he declares, implying that the very fact of a murder in the immediate family functions as a stain, a contaminating history (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge 136). For this man, dedicated to creating a public image of his refinement and distance from all things sordid, even worse than a murder is an investigation of the murder. “‘Consider the impossibility of having any respect for your father-in-law under such unpleasant circumstances,’” he explains and goes on to urge Edward to ‘think of his having been “viewed” by jurors, and “sat upon” by coroners, and of his very doubtful position in the family ever afterwards. It seems to me such an indelicate thing that I really think the girl ought to have been 253 put to death by the state to prevent this happening.’ (Dickens, Barnaby Rudge 136) The body upon which an inquest has been held is sat upon and rendered sordid by the curious gaze of strangers’ eyes and the prying mechanism of the court rather than being immediately hidden in an ancestral vault to putrefy in peace and privacy. Set in the mechanism of investigative inquiry, its expected postmortem narrative disturbed, the body’s position is a “‘doubtful one.’” The inquest’s outcome—the search for truth—does not counter its sullying effects. The inquest does not serve the survivors and the public. It contributes to the family’s dishonor. Having been subjected to public view and public conjecture, the dead body is a contaminated one, and such a disturbance of order acts as a stain upon the survivors. In addition to pointing at the inquest as a source of shame, novels assert a second criticism of the inquest: its inability to fulfill its principal function of revealing the cause of death because of indifference, incompetence, or interference. The jury sitting upon Quilp’s body in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop declares his death a suicide, even though it was an accidental death. In Wilkie Collin’s Heart and Science (1883), the verdict upon Dr. Benjulia’s body declares his death accidental even though it was suicide. Upon an undeniably ambiguous death, that of Nemo in Dickens’s Bleak House, the jury returns a certain verdict, “Accidental death. No doubt” (135). Dickens’s novels satirize both the inquest’s failure to read the body’s story and its failure to protect the vulnerable. The narrator of Oliver Twist remarks, “when there was some more than usually interesting inquest upon a parish child who had been overlooked in turning up a bedstead, or inadvertently scalded to death when there happened to be a washing,” the jury might 254 seek to perform their duty towards the abused dead by “[taking] it into their heads to ask troublesome questions” (15). However, “these impertinences were speedily checked by the evidence of the surgeon . . . the former of whom had always opened the body and found nothing inside (which was very probable indeed)” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 5). The medical witness is not a trusted bastion of unbiased medical inquiry who would read the person’s death narrative on or in the body. The body tells no tales to the surgeon uninterested in reading about neglect and abuse. Even those who could recount the dead person’s history obey the parish authorities, so, for instance, “the beadle . . . invariably swore whatever the parish wanted” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 5). Still, Oliver Twist does not uphold an entirely dismal view of the inquest. Mr. Sowerberry the undertaker and Mr. Bumble the beadle discuss an “‘inquest on that reduced tradesman, who died in a doorway,’ to which the jury returned a verdict of ‘“Died from exposure to the cold, and want of the common necessaries of life”’” (Dickens, Oliver Twist 27). The jury, Sowerberry continues, “‘[added] some words to the effect, that if the relieving officer had—’” thus presenting at least part of a rider implicating the parish officer’s neglect ending in death (Dickens, Oliver Twist 27). This is an accusation that Bumble interrupts, refusing to permit the undertaker to finish. “‘[J]uries is ineddicated, vulgar, groveling wretches,’” he complains (Dickens, Oliver Twist 28). Besides, Bumble adds, “‘If the board attended to all the nonsense that ignorant jurymen talk, they’d have enough to do,’” implying that the board of governors did not attend to juries’ special verdicts (Dickens, Oliver Twist 28). The jury may seek to protect the vulnerable and voiceless by exposing and speaking against abuses of authority, but those very authorities (the parish) quash or ignore the jurors’ implicating verdicts. 255 The coroners’ and witnesses’ ignorance and incompetence produce an invalid investigation, as George Eliot’s critique of the inquest demonstrates in Middlemarch (1871-72). Middlemarch’s young and progressive doctor Tertius Lydgate points out that a legally trained coroner who relies on a medical witness is likely to produce a false verdict based on untrustworthy evidence. Arguing with the Mr. Chichely, the county coroner, over coroners’ qualifications, Lydgate defiantly jabs at the aptitude of lawyers “‘no better than an old woman at a postmortem examination’” and medical witnesses who lack the appropriate knowledge to decipher the body’s evidence (Eliot 148, 149). True, Chichely admits, the law lacks specialized training to decipher the dead body’s language, but “‘it is not the coroner’s business to conduct the postmortem but only to take the evidence of the medical witness’” (Eliot 122). However, Lydgate counters, the medical witness “‘is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself,’” and therefore “‘Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance of decent knowledge in a medical witness’” (Eliot 149). In Lydgate’s argument, the problem is one of the ignorant leading the ignorant. Similarly, Middlemarch’s tradesmen and agricultural workers express distrust towards the medical witness and the ignorant coroner, although for a different reason. The Green Dragon’s patrons judge the inquest unsatisfactory because the coroner lacks the ability to see through a medical witness’s self-interested testimony. Mr. Jonas, the dyer, professes faith in the coroner’s inquest, asking, “‘Why shouldn’t they dig the man up and have the Crowner? . . . If there’s been foul play they might find it out’” (Eliot 691). Mrs. Dollop disagrees, pointing out that medical men “‘[are] a deal too cunning to be found out’” (Eliot 691). Medical men are not trustworthy witnesses with the 256 community’s well-being in mind. Consequently, their involvement is more likely to produce a cover-up rather than an uncovering. In Middlemarch, both the medical man and community proclaim the inquest a failure because those who guide the investigation are likely to be know-nothings who produce and uphold bad evidence. A third problem novels point out about the inquest is the very basis of its inquiry, that which should guarantee success but instead poses a significant threat to the investigation: evidence. When there is a murder that ought to be investigated and punished, sometimes no inquest can be initiated because there is no condemning evidence accessible to would-be investigators. This, Middlemarch demonstrates, is because the legal investigation is crippled by the sort of evidence it can collect—namely, external evidence. Middlemarch makes it clear that Raffles’s death is a suspicious one and offers the reader, but not the inhabitants Middlemarch, evidence necessary to implicate his killer. Raffles, stricken ill by delirium tremens, lay under the care of Bulstrode, the banker whom he was blackmailing by threatening to expose the illegal origins of his great fortune. The narrative offers the reader this motive for murder as well as internal evidence of Bulstrode’s desire to murder. The banker “could not but see the death of Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance” (Eliot 672). Finally, Middlemarch shows the reader what no individual could see: the murder’s circumstances. Lydgate, who is treating Raffles, instructs Bulstrode not to give him alcohol. However, when the nurse, Mrs. Abel, asks Bulstrode permission to give Raffles alcohol, he gives her access to brandy stored in the wine-cooler. Raffles subsequently dies as a result of this deliberate non-compliance with Lydgate’s instructions. Inquiry into Raffles’s death, Mr. Fairbrother muses, “‘must be either publicly by setting the magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by 257 questioning Lydgate. As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go on’” (Eliot 698). The evidence that can condemn Bulstrode is primarily internal evidence: the banker’s internal moral struggle, his desire to see Raffles dead, and his determination “to create in him [Lydgate] a strong sense of personal obligation,” by giving him sufficient funds to pay his ponderous thousand-pound debt (Eliot 673). This loan and his actions to hide the brandy after it did its deadly work on Raffles are the only actions that could implicate Bulstrode. Neither action would condemn him in a court of law. Only the reader can access the condemnatory internal evidence through the narrative’s records of Bulstrode’s thoughts. The coroner cannot do likewise, and so no legal inquest can take place. When the legal inquest fails to investigate, the community can construct an extra- legal inquiry to take its place. The community suspects Lydgate of having taken a loan as a bribe to keep quiet about the murder of Raffles. Determined to substantiate its own speculations, the group holds a community-led and gossip-directed inquest. This investigation can act where the legal inquest cannot because it does not restrict itself to facts. Like the legal inquest, the community-led inquiry strives to answer a question posed by the dead body, but unlike the legal inquest, the extra-legal inquest responds to the community’s desire for a satisfying narrative about motives. The response is formulated not in fact but gossip-based supposition. Certainty is not necessary, for in Middlemarch, “vague conviction of indeterminable guilt . . . had for the general mind all the superior power of mystery over fact. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it” (Eliot 688). Although it replaces what the community deems an inadequate mode of investigation, the community inquest still mimics in comic 258 form the legal inquest’s purpose and structure. The Green Dragon’s patrons act as witnesses by telling stories about the circumstances relating to the death and as coroner by inferring motives and calling medical witnesses. On the basis of the evidence Mr. Hawley offers them about Raffles’s death, the doctors Mr. Toller and Mr. Wrench, “declared that they could see nothing in these particulars which could be transformed in to a positive ground of suspicion” (Eliot 688). Undeterred by this failure of the evidence to support its burgeoning murder theory, the community insists that “the moral grounds of suspicion remained” (Eliot 688). Suspicion replaces the chain of evidence, so while the community inquest mimics the forms of the legal inquest, it substitutes gossip-based inference for legally accepted verity. Untrammeled by concerns over strong evidence, the community-led inquiry investigates where the law would not. Rumor thus affords a far more satisfactory (but by no means legal) verdict—guilty by suspicion and conjecture. This inquest is satisfying for the Green Dragon’s patrons but not for the reader. While the extra-legal inquest rightly indicts Bulstrode for Raffles’s death, it also implicates Lydgate, who did not cause Raffles’s death. The extra-legal inquest is therefore unsatisfactory compared to the rich interweaving of subjectivities that the novel can offer; conjecture is a paltry means of discovering motives and truth, as Middlemarch clearly demonstrates. Even when there is external evidence available, investigators’ inability to secure a strong chain of evidence leads to failure. Securing such evidence is difficult for even the most diligent of investigators. “A long forensic tradition,” Welsh writes, “assumes that some witnesses lie and others get the facts wrong” (140-141). Direct testimony, a report of what the witness actually saw occur, is unreliable because people are unreliable 259 witnesses either by intention or as a result of the capriciousness of interpretation and memory. Compounded with the difficulty of securing court testimony from witnesses, witness unreliability makes it unlikely that investigators can present strong evidence to the jury. Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South exposes the inquest’s utter failure to reveal a cause of death because of the difficulties procuring necessary evidence. The novel clearly questions the reliability of direct evidence, thereby pointing to evidence as the weak link in legal inquiry. Margaret Hale escorts her brother Frederick—who, as an accused mutineer, forfeits his life should he be found in England—to the Outwood train station. At the station, Leonards, who intends to inform on Frederick in order to collect a £100 reward, recognizes him. The two men struggle briefly until the inebriated Leonards falls from no great height off the train platform. Later that evening, he dies. The police inspector, George Watson, makes preliminary inquiries to determine whether an inquest must be held, based upon evidence of there being a struggle involving two men. But what is Watson’s “‘pretty distinct chain of evidence’”? On the one hand, a porter saw a scuffle, and a grocer’s assistant identifies the lady as Margaret Hale. On the other hand, having “never recovered sufficient consciousness to give any distinct account of his fall,” Leonards gives what Thornton (a magistrate) describes as “‘some kind of a rambling statement, which the clerk said was of not great use,’” and Margaret firmly denies being at that station that Thursday evening (Gaskell 264, 268). Even had she not lied to protect Frederick, Margaret’s eyewitness account of the struggle is unreliable, for although standing within feet of Frederick and Leonards, she could not tell how it happened: “Margaret did not see, for everything danced before her eyes” (Gaskell 254-55). Watson 260 returns again and again to the unreliability of the eyewitness testimony he had gathered. He thinks to himself, “The information he had received was very vague,” “There was no certainty . . . but there was great probability,” and yet “‘the evidence was so uncertain . . . that the man had received any blow at all’” (Gaskell 263, 264, 272). The porter, Watson thinks, “would not stick firm to anything” as a witness, and the grocer’s assistant too would most likely refuse to testify after Margaret’s denial. In all, the inspector confesses, had the inquest gone on, “‘It would have been a troublesome job and no satisfaction’” (Gaskell 271). Furthermore, Thornton had seen Margaret that night at the station but determines to “save Margaret” by preventing the inquest. This, he reasons, is not difficult since the inquiry had only a doubtful evidentiary basis, such as “the uncertainty of the medical testimony (which he had vaguely heard the night before, from the surgeon in attendance)” (Gaskell 270). Far from pointing without a doubt to the cause of death, “the doctors had discovered an internal disease far advanced, and sure to prove fatal; they had stated that death might have been accelerated by the fall, or by the subsequent drinking and exposure to cold” (Gaskell 270). Leonards might have died regardless of the fall, would have died anyway, or caused his own death by bad behavior. The narrative of the thwarted investigation repeats various expressions of uncertainty and vagueness when relating characters’ views of the evidence. Even though the reader witnessed the accident and can judge according to the narrative’s various forms of evidence (including motives, impossible for the inspector to hunt down), it is doubtful that a legal inquiry could infer a narrative so complete. This is no fault of a bumbling court. It is true that Thornton interferes in the inquiry, but the evidence was in question before that, particularly because one witness deliberately withholds information. 261 Good evidence can be difficult to procure, even in a well-managed inquest. A badly managed inquest, Dickens’s Bleak House shows, is a tragic comedy. Even worse, this novel indicates that the inquest searches for the wrong narrative. It is not the body’s truth that needs to be investigated but the person’s truth. The truth is not to be found in a postmortem report but a life history. Nemo’s inquest in Bleak House exposes the inquest as inept, unlikely to recognize any evidence worth hearing, and certainly unlikely to produce a worthy verdict. The beadle, whose responsibility is to find witnesses, is “referred to innumerable people who can tell nothing whatever” (Dickens, Bleak House 130). Only one man in the courtroom can shed light upon Nemo’s past: the landlord Krook, who stole Nemo’s letters even though he is illiterate and trusts no one to read to him. “The Jury learn how the subject of their inquiry died, and learn no more about him,” the narrator quips. Next the coroner interviews Mrs. Piper who “has a good deal to say . . . but not much to tell” (Dickens, Bleak House 133). Nemo’s ruination, misery, and isolation, the probable causes of his opium use, are evidence utterly discarded by the court when Jo offers that testimony. It is only in an extra-legal examination, conducted by the coroner and Mr. Tulkinghorn after the inquest, that Jo can testify that “that the dead man . . . was sometimes hooted and pursued about the streets,” but that he expressed concern about and solidarity with Jo’s friendless state and generally “‘was wery good to me’” (Dickens, Bleak House 135). This is the substance of the lonely man’s life, as empty as it was, and it is this substance, this life history, that the inquest refuses to acknowledge as important. Notably, Jo’s testimony later forms a link in the chain of evidence revealing Captain Hawdon’s life history that the novel constructs, demonstrating that the novelist considers his testimony important. Without the life history, the coroner summarizes the 262 case solely upon the physiological fact of opium overdose. This “‘Inkwich,’” as Jo calls it, is like everything else in law—muddied by ink (of the reporters’ ravenous pens), bad management, incompetent legal officers and agents, and outdated legal machinery. Furthermore, Dickens here suggests that determining the physiological cause of the body’s death does not fully answer questions about the cause of the person’s death. Nemo’s history as Captain Hawdon is not one an inquest can uncover, for the inquest focuses on determining the immediate, physical cause of death. The inquiry is unconcerned with a life history that might reveal the social cause of one man’s death. This inquest uncovers nothing; consequently, the inquisitive narrator and readers must seek Nemo’s history elsewhere. That elsewhere is the novel’s narrative. Inquests—legal and extra-legal—ultimately fail fully to investigate the cause of death. Both fail on the point of evidence. Legal inquests are unable to procure, recognize, or make use of pertinent evidence. Extra-legal inquests prefer conjecture over actual evidence. Only the novel’s narrative and its chain of evidence provide the information necessary to tell the story. The story is not one of a death but of a life. It is clear that Nemo takes a fatal dose of opium, but whether his overdose was intentional or accidental is unanswerable in the coroner’s court. Through the testimony of various characters and their inferences based upon circumstantial evidence (letters, handwriting, the histories of other characters), the narrative of Bleak House gives the reader enough evidence to put together Captain Hawdon’s story while suggesting that he might have committed suicide. Mr. George testifies that Hawdon “‘carried on heavily and went to ruin’” and had once jumped off a ship in a possible suicide attempt (Dickens, Bleak House 269). Smallweed makes it clear that Hawdon owed large amounts of money to his “‘friend in the city’” 263 (Dickens, Bleak House 266). Hawdon’s own writing and a “‘chain of circumstances,’” as Guppy puts it, connects Honoria’s lover, Esther’s father, and the ruined man with the abject and alienated law-writer (Dickens, Bleak House 363). This “fearicious’” man, Mrs. Piper testifies, was “wexed and worrited by the children’” of the neighborhood and would “hurry away when run and called after” (Dickens, Bleak House 134). Jo reports that having “found that he had not a friend in the world, [Nemo] said, ‘Neither have I. Not one!’” (Dickens, Bleak House 135). Finally, Nemo’s own detailed records of his drug consumption indicate that he knew quite well what doses he could stand. Nevertheless, an overdose might or might not have been an error in judgment since those accustomed to drugs have been known inadvertently to take more than their systems could withstand. The reader can infer that this once handsome man, having become ragged, poor, and utterly alone, most likely killed himself. But there is no absolute certainty. After all, the point is not whether Hawdon overdosed accidentally or intentionally. The overdose instigates the more important inquiry, that which tells a story of a life rather than a death. For Dickens, an inquiry upon the cause of death is not the prerogative of jurisprudence; it is an inquiry upon a life’s history, one that only a narrator who can be everywhere, see everything, and read motives and intent. A narrator also rectifies the inquest’s problem with proving and indicting upon proximate cause (an event that triggers a series of occurrences resulting in injury or death). In order to prove proximate cause, a court must establish the existence of the “but for” rule, that “but for” a defendant’s action, the injury would not have occurred. On occasion, the inquest verdicts admitted a proximate cause, most often headed by the phrase “accelerated by”—death by natural causes “accelerated by” the treatment of 264 prison officers, or natural death “accelerated by” the neglect of relieving officers. It is possible to indict a person or several persons, but it is more difficult, if not impossible, to indict an institution. To whom can the jury impute a proximate cause of death if the cause of death is starvation and the deceased did not apply for relief? Newspapers and periodicals might implicate the Poor Law, but the court’s structure—its rules of evidence and conviction and its understanding of proximate cause as being an event perpetrated by a person or persons—disallows such judgment. Poor Jo in Bleak House “‘Never know’d nothink,’” lacked parents and family, knowledge of God, and experience of others’ kindness except from an equally alienated Nemo and a furtive Mr. Snagsby (Dickens, Bleak House 571). When death sheds light “upon the dark benighted way,” the narrator takes on the mantle of coroner and summarizes Jo’s case to the jury: “Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us every day” (Dickens, Bleak House 572). And thus, the narrator-as- coroner implicates his nineteenth-century readers and their society for the death of Jo and others like him. Mrs. Jellyby alone is not responsible for the “telescopic philanthropy” that concentrated upon the residents of “Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger” instead of England’s abject and ignorant indigents (Dickens, Bleak House 38). But for such reprehensible lack of compassion for the poor of England, Dickens declares, Jo would have been educated, loved, and still living. The lack of “heavenly compassion” is a society-wide failing and the proximate cause of Jo’s being obliged to move on and move on out of the sight of respectable people and into the grave. Here again the novel 265 demonstrates its superiority in not merely investigation but also, and more importantly, the indictment of agents responsible for a death. Dickens’s Bleak House most famously implicates Chancery itself as a proximate cause of ruin, madness, and death. Gridley, the Man from Shropshire and “Another ruined suitor” of Chancery, indicts that court for his ruin and his habitually enraged disposition. Once a farmer from Shropshire but now ruined by a frivolous suit, Gridley has become a man defined by his “passion and heat . . . and violent gestures” (Dickens, Bleak House 192). As he explains, “‘It is only by resenting them . . . and by angrily demanding the justice I never get, that I am able to keep my wits together,’” unlike mad Miss Flite (Dickens, Bleak House 192). Gridley’s anger does not outlast Chancery’s slow, grinding wheel; after twenty-five years, he becomes “The faintest shadow of an object full of form and colour” (Dickens, Bleak House 313). Gridley testifies to the proximate cause of his death, saying, “‘I thought, boastfully, that they never could break my heart . . . But I am worn out,’” but even he can only “‘accuse the individual workers of that system’” rather than the system itself (Dickens, Bleak House 314; 193). In contrast, the narrative implicates the law’s businessmen and the law itself. In Richard Carstone’s case, the narrative produces the following evidence: other characters’ inferences, Richard’s apparent decline, the behavior of his legal counselor, Vholes, and the testimony of the dying body itself. Vholes’s actions constitute the most concrete proximate cause of Richard’s demise, which might not have occurred but for Vholes’s counsel. (The reader might further trace the causation of Richard’s demise to the troublesome Harold Skimpole, whom Vholes bribes with a five-pound note for an introduction to Richard.) Vholes is merely a respectable man of the law who “never 266 misses a chance in his practice” (Dickens, Bleak House 482). “The one great principle of the English law is to make business for itself,” and Vholes is but an agent of that business (Dickens, Bleak House 482). In truth, it is the mechanism of Chancery, even the law in general, that is the ultimate proximate cause for Richard’s demise. As a measurement of the impact of Vholes (the servant) and the law (the master) upon their prey, the omniscient narrator adds the evidence of Richard’s psychological alteration. The third- person narrator explains what characters may guess at but not definitely discern: the change in Richard’s disposition. His “heart is heavy with corroding care, suspense, distrust, and doubt . . . how different he, how different all the colours of his mind” from the young man so full of “high spirits” and “flush and fire and laughter” that Esther earlier describes (Dickens, Bleak House 498, 471). “‘He wouldn’t keep out of Jarndyce,’” Guppy notes, adding his testimony to the building case (Dickens, Bleak House 489). Likewise, Esther sadly observes, “Jarndyce and Jarndyce had obtained such possession his whole nature that” it distorted his reason (Dickens, Bleak House 521). When he is dying and finally able to understand his plight, Richard testifies on his own behalf that his “‘mortal world’” has become a part of Chancery, and so “‘I have an object now—or it has me’” (Dickens, Bleak House 609). Richard’s heart, others’ observations, Vholes’s vampiric service to the law—the chain of evidence accuses Chancery and the law but would be inadmissible in a coroner’s court as irrelevant, fanciful, or mere rumor. Functioning as a court, Bleak House indicts the law. The two narrators gather and present much evidence that clearly implicates Chancery, but the most powerful testimony against Chancery is Richard’s own body. Carstone’s looks testify for him when he does not understand enough to accuse, like Gridley, the system or its actors. Esther’s narrative 267 traces Richard’s fall from a lively young man, to “the portrait of young despair,” to a man “[s]o worn and haggard . . . even in the fullness of his handsome youth” though still “robust in body,” until at last she finds him “thin and languid,” his “youth and youthful beauty . . . all fallen away” in the grip of “a ruin of youth which is not like age” (Dickens, Bleak House 489, 545, 550, 722). Richard’s physical decline is symptomatic of his psychological suffering and the change of heart that the omniscient narrator points out. As historians Page duBois and Lisa Silverman explain, ancient Greek and Roman law codified the belief that a body in pain spoke the truth, be it through speech, gesture, expression, or change in pallor. Reversing the logic of torture in which the body in pain forces out the mind’s truth, Richard’s tortured mind speaks its truth through his body in the language of physical decline. By torturing the mind, Jarndyce and Jarndyce tortures the body. Like the tortured body, according to ancient belief, the corpse also tells the truth. It was believed that the dead body accused the murderer by bleeding in his presence, and even as late as 1750, Silverman writes in Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France (2001), “The corpses of murder victims were used for the evidence they might bring against their assailants” (61). Once Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes to an end, the entire estate having been consumed by the monstrous case, Allan Woodcourt seeks out Richard, whom he finds sitting in the corner of the court . . . like a stone figure. On being roused, he had broken away and made as if he would have spoken in a fierce voice to the judge. He was stopped by his mouth being full of blood. (Dickens, Bleak House 761) Richard is already a dead man, and from this dead man’s mouth spills his accusation, not the condemnatory words he meant to speak, but his life’s blood. The blood, then, speaks 268 for him and speaks more clearly than can human language: the law has made a corpse of his once-lively body. A nineteenth-century inquest would not have accepted the ancient evidence of a corpse’s bloody accusation, but the novel can effectively produce such an accusation. Thus the novel gives the reader ancient evidence of the accusing dead, Esther’s direct evidence of Richard’s appearance and Vholes’s actions, and the third- person narrator’s discernment of motives and soul. The novel can produce a strong chain of evidence and invite the reader to deliberate and indict upon its basis to an extent no law can match. Dickens demonstrates that deaths can have causes that cannot always be imputed to individuals and that the novel can implicate social institutions and widespread social neglect for the deaths of its citizens. Grimsby’s and Richard’s deaths are not “natural deaths”; they are decidedly unnatural, a product of a manmade structure—the law, whose purpose is to make business for itself and whose business produces ruined men and corpses. Coroners’ discourse on the inquest promised an ideal of an invaluable court of inquiry that functioned only with the participation of the public and only for the public’s wellbeing. However, as novels imply, perhaps there is no way to truly tell the person’s and the body’s tale to everybody’s satisfaction. The medical witness may interpret and speak the tale of dead flesh in the coroner’s court, but his language of diagnosis does not fully reveal motives and social conditions that contribute directly or indirectly to the death. Non-medical witness narratives can reveal the conditions under which a death took place but without also showing the physiological reasons for death. Only the novel, it seems, can discern truth and dispense justice untrammeled by the rules of evidence or even the limitations of human investigation. 269 Modern postmortem judicial inquiries have access to a greater number of and far more refined investigative tools than the nineteenth-century inquest. Forensic specialists and coroners or medical examiners can say whether an injury occurred before or after death, use the reproductive cycles of insects to ascertain an approximate time of the host’s death, sift through various injuries and diseases in a single body to determine just which caused the death, and trace the amounts of drugs and poisons in a body as well as the time between ingestion and death. The murderer is increasingly at a disadvantage because of ever-more refined modes of picking up and testing evidence. A murderer may be identified, put on trial, and convicted because of a few mere fibers left on the body. Still, superb forensic science cannot definitively lay the blame. Toxicology can uncover which combination of drugs killed the body, but it cannot say who is to blame. Who is at fault for the overdose deaths of Anna Nicole Smith and Heath Ledger? Their caretakers and psychiatrists? Themselves? Their families? Who killed Princess Diana? Which direct or proximate causes are most at fault? How far back is it prudent to trace proximate cause? Can it be traced back, as some tried to do, to the royal family? Or is the driver the one responsible party? Or was Diana at fault for allowing herself to employ a then-drunk driver? Even now it seems that only a novel could fully relate the causes of death. Only the narrator and the reader can say who really is at fault. 270 Chapter Four Endnotes i Dickens observes in Bleak House, “The Coroner frequents more public-houses than any man alive. The smell of sawdust, beer, tobacco-smoke, and spirits, is inseparable in his vocation from death in its most awful shapes,” and the jury lingered, no doubt with a beer in hand, after the inquest’s conclusion (Dickens, Bleak House 132). One biographer of Thomas Wakley scathingly censures the inquest of the first half of the nineteenth century, writing that “the taint of the tavern-parlour vitiated the evidence, ruined the discretion of the jurors, and detracted from the dignity of the coroner” (Sprigge 344). Under these circumstances, the inquest “had been universally degraded to a dreary farce, stage-managed by a foolish beadle, . . . and where the majesty of death evaporated with the fumes from the gin of the jury” (Sprigge 344). The public nature of the inquest, overflowing as it did from its structure as a public forum to the individual inquest’s setting in a public house, doubtless worked against the cause of inquiry and justice by muddling investigation with gin. It was not until the 1875 Public Health Act that the government intervened between tavern and corpse by providing to construct public mortuaries and coroner’s courts by local authorities out of public funds (Burney). ii As the era of the coronership’s revolution between the 1830s and into the twentieth century progressed, viewing the body was increasingly frowned upon. In 1901, Mr. G. Bateman, deputy coroner of St. Albans district at Hertforshire and member of the Coroner’s Association, remarks to a committee on coroners and the law that the viewing “is absolutely useless” and “an absolute farce” (First Report 183). When asked whether the jurymen “take an intelligent interest in it,” Bateman offers a short reply: “Not the slightest; they want to get out of it as quickly as possible” (First Report 183). The jury “[does] not examine the body, just to see that there is a body upon which to hold an inquest” (First Report 183). In fact, he explains, the body is displayed “coffined, with the face only exposed,” and the jury “go in with their hands up to their noses and their eyes half shut; they walk through the room and come out” (First Report 183). So useless is such a mode of conducting a view that “you might have had a dummy there so far as being able to ascertain anything as to the cause of death by the view” (First Report 183). Obviously, the jurymen continued their subversion of the viewing throughout of the century, but the jurymen were not the only ones to protest the viewing. After a time, the jury’s view of the body was regarded less as a necessity and more as a nuisance and a potential danger. Sanitarians argued that viewing the body invited infection, represented a desecration of the body (by subjecting the dead body to the probing gaze of strangers, assuming that the jurymen actually looked at it), a sanitary horror (the possibility of contagion transferring from dead flesh to living juryman), and an outrage to sensibility (Burney). There were other problems, too, with the viewing. Jurymen were laymen with untrained eyes. Even if the jury looked, without the benefit of a medical education, they could misinterpret the body and give inaccurate verdicts. The article “Observations on the Nature and Importance of Medical Jurisprudence” (1820) warns, “the most common grounds for the erroneous opinions respecting the way in which the deceased came by his death, have been the external appearances of the body” (133). Mere appearance is problematic because the “superficial or common observer . . . [can be] misled into an erroneous opinion respecting the cause of death by a hasty, careless, or ignorant investigation of the appearances which were observed on the surface of the body” (“Observations” 133; emphasis added). Then, not only does the jury subvert their purpose by not looking, but even when they do look, their inexpert gaze threatens to misinterpret the evidence. For these critics, the only way to ensure a proper investigation of the cause of death would be to abolish the jury’s viewing and order a medical man to open the body, thereby peering beneath the surface, where, presumably, the truth awaits discovery. iii A prime example of the postmortem examination’s ability to dispel rumors and bring to light the true cause of death is the case of Anne Walsh, a young woman rumored to have killed herself. Upon the evidence that her mouth and fingers were blackened, even the surgeon, Mr. Ryder, “said that from what he had heard he strongly suspected at first that she had poisoned herself,” but after performing a postmortem examination, he concluded “that she had died from the rupture of a blood-vessel on the right posterior part of the brain. She had taken no poison” (Times 15 Sept. 1838: 7). On the other hand, in an 1831 inquest held at Cripplegate workhouse, “Two surgeons made a post mortem examination. They stated that the parts were 271 perfectly healthy, and they could not account for her [the pauper’s] death” (Times 20 April 1831: 4). The postmortem examination, then, sometimes revealed the truth and sometimes revealed nothing at all except possibly medical incompetence. Furthermore, even in cases where the medical man does produce a cause of death, another medical man might very well disagree. The body testifies; the medical witness deciphers the body; but not all witnesses would read the corpse in the same way. “Observations on the Nature and Importance of Medical Jurisprudence” recounts an inquest case wherein “the medical men . . . founded the most contradictory opinions on the appearances discoverable on the body of the deceased; each leading to a conclusion, diametrically opposed to the others” (134). The author attributes this problematic situation to the need for a greater “particular cultivation of this branch of medicine by the profession,” for forensic medicine had been introduced into medical education in the form of a university chair only a few years before this publication (“Observations” 134). Even twenty years later the same difficulty would emerge, originating in the lack of consensus on diagnosis, which pointed to the infamously varied learning that the state of medical education at the time afforded. A comparison of the evidence of the union medical officer Holdgate and London surgeon Ancell in the Lisney case demonstrates both the multiplicity of possible corpse readings and Wakley’s wisdom in keeping his medical witnesses separate and in urging his jury to consider bringing in a medical witness from outside the parish. Holdgate and the poorhouse authorities (including Wakley’s previous nemesis, the Reverend Williams) contended that Lisney’s habitual drunkenness contributed more to his death than his confinement in a room without fire in early November. Hinting at his greater experience, London surgeon Ancell counters the medical officer’s claim; he found no signs of habitual drunkenness and attributed the cause of death to typhoid fever, thereby bolstering the allegation that the man’s mistreatment at the hands of the workhouse authorities triggered the disease that killed him. iv This debate, varying in ferocity and urgency, continued on into the twentieth century, and it is likely that there has been no accord on the issue to this day. It was not until the 1926 Coroners (Amendment) Act that eligibility for a coronership required qualifications: no person shall be qualified to be appointed to be a coroner . . . or a deputy or assistant deputy to a county or borough coroner, unless he is a barrister, solicitor, or legally qualified medical practitioner, of not less than five years standing in his profession. (Coroners (Amendment) Bill 1) Seven years after the 1926 reforms, lawyer A. P. Herbet’s 1933 satire Who is the Coroner argues that “coroners’ courts were unnecessary, unreliable . . . criticized the idea that a court of law could be effective when presided over by doctors who had no legal qualifications,” not a surprising opinion coming from a lawyer (Scranton and Chadwick 36). However, in the mid-twentieth century, a historian and legally trained coroner writes, “To meet the needs of modern medico-legal investigation the minimal requirements for a chief coroner would be qualifications, and preferably university degrees, in both law and medicine, with post-graduate experience in both criminal courts and forensic pathology,” thereby seeming to demonstrate that medical and legal coroners have reached an agreement that both medical and legal training is requisite (Harvard 209). Phil Scranton and Kathryn Chadwick’s 1987 examination of the problems, ambiguities, and contradictions of the coroner and the inquest in late-twentieth-century England, In the Arms of the Law: Coroner’s Inquests and Deaths in Custody, points out evidence of continuing support for legal training as the proper background for a coroner. Furthermore, among the reforms they advocate during and at the end of their study, Scranton and Chadwick state that “coroners require greater experience in the law than is presently deemed necessary” (172). They reason, not entirely unjustly, that both sides (the deceased’s family and the persons who are potentially liable for the death) are likely to have legal representation whose legal maneuverings would be too complicated and subtle for a medically trained coroner who lacks the knowledge necessary to counter such maneuverings or the ability to grant his jury an impartial summing up. In short, they claim, experienced lawyers would overpower such a coroner. Still circling on the medical man’s potential incapacity to serve as coroner because of his lack of legal training—albeit primarily on the basis of his lack of legal acumen rather than the uselessness of medical knowledge in the inquest—the debate begun in the 1830s continues among inquest reformers. 272 v Predating the office of magistrates by nearly two hundred years, the coroner’s office once represented one of the two modes by which homicides were prosecuted (being the most popular mode, according to historian and coroner J. D. J. Harvard, by the thirteenth century). Since the 1361 Justices of the Peace Act established the office of magistrate, the justices slowly but inexorably appropriated the coroner’s jurisdiction and powers. Harvard dates the acceleration of such power stripping and overt hostility between the coroners and magistrates to the 1751 Act (25. Geo. II, c. 29, s.1) that raised the coroner’s fees but tied payment to magistrates’ declaring the inquest “duly” held, which the magistrates interpreted as “necessarily” held. The coroner decided whether he would call an inquest upon a body, but he was responsible for paying all fees out of pocket (paying for the use of the room in which the inquest is held and the room holding the body, the medical witness and the postmortem examination, and the jury members, the witnesses, and the constables). According to the 1837 Act, the coroner must submit a per-case account of his actions as coroner to the magistrates before the treasurer remunerated his expenses, and such payment depended upon the approval of the magistrates and councils. Exercising their power under this Act to approve or condemn the coroner’s decisions to hold inquests on certain bodies, the magistrates sought to subject the coroner’s office by allowing or withholding payment for individual inquests according to their decisions even though the coroner could be sued by inquests’ participants for non-payment regardless of whether he himself had been (or would be) paid. The magistrates’ interference with the coroner’s office accelerated after the 1836 Medical Witnesses Act and the 1837 Act to Provide for Payment of the Expenses of Holding Coroner’s Inquests (which raised the coroner’s fees for the first time since 1751). vi Beginning in the early 1840s, juries became bolder in implying the indirect cause of death. The jury for an inquest held before LePipre, the Crown Coroner, on the death of a debtor, the Reverend George Gordon Smith, announced “‘That the deceased died of pulmonary consumption, and that his death was accelerated by imprisonment’” even though that inquest revealed far less mistreatment of the dead man than inquests in many prison deaths, the verdicts of which remained silent on diet and discipline (Times 21 May 1840: 7). In the early 1840s, several of those verdicts that did imply guilt pointed to the emotional problems of the prisoners rather than problems with prison discipline. For instance, an 1841 inquest verdict reads, “‘Natural death, accelerated by mental excitement produced by imprisonment’” (Times 8 Feb 1841: 7). Another jury before the same coroner produced a verdict of “‘Natural death, in some degree accelerated by imprisonment’” (Times 8 Feb 1841: 7). Two years later, one jury openly places blame: “‘That the deceased, Richard Jones, died form the ill-treatment he received while in Northleach House of Correction, from hard labour, want of food, and from no other causes’” (Times 14 April 1843: 5). This latter unusual verdict must have been in part produced because during the previous year a great public outcry occurred over the death of Charles Beale in the same prison, a death that was partly responsible for a governmental investigation into prison discipline (the 1843 Report Relating to Northleach House of Correction). Also in the early 1840s, prison inquests began to warrant their own titles such as “Death in the House of Correction,” “Death in the Queen’s Prison,” “Another Death in the Millbank Prison,” or the somewhat sarcastic “The Model Prison, Pentonville,” whereas previously prison inquests were grouped under “Coroner’s Inquests” or, very rarely, “Prison Discipline.” Obviously, beginning in the early 1840s, the public and juries became increasingly concerned with prison discipline and the effects upon prisoners. By the late 1840s, however, The Times reported far fewer prison inquests than in previous years; The Times reported 68 prison inquests in the 1830s and only 20 in the 1840s. Undoubtedly, this was not because there were fewer deaths. Such evidence seems to indicate that public interest in inquests waxed and waned. Nevertheless, Sim and Ward assert that juries continued to develop their tendency to increase their investigations and criticism of penitentiaries. After the middle of the nineteenth century, “Coroners’ juries thus played an important part in raising popular discontents about the disciplinary orientation of the prisons” (Sim and Ward 262). By the 1880s, medical officers and medical publications (including The Lancet) complained of too much abuse and attacks from juries, who accused medical officers of setting a diet that would starve prisoners (Sim; Sim and Ward). “It was here,” in the inquest of the second half of the nineteenth century, “that the statements of prison managers and medical officers were often severely challenged” (Sim 46). Eventually, then, repeated instances of grouped prison deaths from malnutrition, consequent disease, poor medical care, and over-zealous discipline (resulting in suicides), coupled with what historian Michael Ignatieff describes in A Just Measure of Pain as recurring political attacks upon the separation and silent penitentiary 273 discipline systems, brought the public’s attention to bear upon the state of prisoners’ bodies, living and dead. Earlier in the century, however, interest in the prisoner’s inquest—overzealous or reasonable— evidently was lacking. vii Besides the danger of interested and therefore untrustworthy investigation and testimony, more likely to conceal than reveal the cause of death, the medical officer and his assistants repeatedly demonstrated their disrespect for the convicts’ bodies. Several convicts declare that there were as many as six bodies at one time in the shack that served as a dead-house. The corpses, one states, “were all placed each side of one another in the dead-house,” and yet no officials, not even those of the investigating committee, express horror at the crowding of convict corpses together (Inquiry into the General Treatment 65). Dead convicts’ body parts sometimes went astray. Bossy claims that he kept only “morbid specimens” of convict corpses, but the previous assistant-surgeon, Mr. Phillips, unbeknownst to his superior medical officer, was stealing body parts (according to one convict who was responsible for cleaning the dead-house, four heads, “One foot, one hand, one thigh and a leg” as well as “several kidneys”) (Inquiry into the General Treatment 58). Some medical men paid too much attention to the body parts, keeping them in order to further study their pathologies, other body parts were too much neglected. 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Asset Metadata

Creator Garnica, Alicia María (author)

Core Title The curious life of the corpse in nineteenth-century English literature and culture

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 04/08/2009

Defense Date 12/03/2008

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Anatomy,Anatomy Act,body-snatchers,Burial,Charles Dickens,class,College of Surgeons,coroners,Death,Dissection,Edwin Chadwick,Elizabeth Gaskell,George Eliot,good death,industrial novel,inquest,Medicine,Novels,OAI-PMH Harvest,Royal Commission Reports,sanitarians,Select Committee Reports,Southwood Smith,Undertakers

Place Name England (countries)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), Levine, Philippa (committee member)

Creator Email aliciamgarnica@aol.com,fernande@aol.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2053

Unique identifier UC1296295

Identifier etd-Garnica-2680 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-211895 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2053 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Garnica-2680.pdf

Dmrecord 211895

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Garnica, Alicia María

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu