Nineteenth Century Popular Fiction, Medicine and Anatomy: The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832 Anatomy Act

268 Pages·2019·3.89 MB·English

by  Anna Gasperini

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Nineteenth Century
Popular Fiction,
Medicine and Anatomy
The Victorian Penny Blood and
the 1832 Anatomy Act
Anna Gasperini
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Catherine Belling
Feinberg School of Medicine
Northwestern University
Chicago, IL, USA
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Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies,
Stony Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
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Anna Gasperini
Nineteenth Century
Popular Fiction,
Medicine
and Anatomy
The Victorian Penny Blood and the 1832
Anatomy Act
Anna Gasperini
Independent Scholar
Perugia, Italy
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-10915-8 ISBN 978-3-030-10916-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10916-5
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To my husband. Thank you.
[A]natomy is the very basis of surgery […] [It] informs the
head, gives dexterity to the hand, and familiarizes the heart
with a sort of necessary inhumanity […].
William Hunter, anatomist, 1764
Well, for my part […] I think it’s wery hard if, after paying rates
and taxes […] I should be obleeged to go to the workhus,
and then be cut up in a surgeon’s slaughterhouse at last.
Poor widow Mrs. Smith, The Mysteries of London, 1845
Horror is about trying to codify anxiety, trying to name
and understand those things we fear.
John Logan, creator of horror Tv show Penny Dreadful, 2014
P
reface
Dissecting a Literary Monster: Why?
We are used to thinking about monsters as frightening: grotesque
assemblages of malformed parts, often huge, possibly supernatural, and
certainly malevolent. Yet, if one looks up the word ‘monster’ in the dic-
tionary, he/she will discover a more nuanced meaning which consists,
simultaneously, of ‘frightening’, ‘huge’, and ‘marvellous’.1 In this multi-
faceted sense, the penny blood genre is a literary monster: a gargantuan
combination of scattered pieces from those cultural forms that did not
have a place in mainstream knowledge, an abomination for those social
strata that could not control it, but wonderful for the masses that in the
1830s and 1840s were discovering the pleasure of leisure reading.
For a long time, the penny bloods and penny dreadfuls were all but
forgotten, a mythical creature barely mentioned as something compara-
ble to the monstrous hybrid of gothic novels and better forms of serial-
ized popular fiction. This rather unkind perception stemmed from the
original Victorian middle-class viewpoint on the penny bloods, which
perceived this subversive literary form—violent, licentious, almost freely
available to the working-class and, most of all, beyond their control—
as dangerous. This negative narrative had long-lasting consequences.
Until relatively recently, it influenced academic judgement of the penny
bloods’ importance as a literary form, crucially impacting on the produc-
tion and circulation of knowledge about them. It could be said that, for
the best part of their posthumous life so far, penny bloods have been
ix
x PREFACE
considered the eccentric relatives of the Victorian literature family: sel-
dom included in formal gathering invitations, no one would willingly
acknowledge any closeness to them, nor discuss their outlandish quirks
in too much detail, if at all. The prejudice started decreasing thanks to
the early efforts of such scholars as Edward S. Turner and Louis James,
who first analysed the scarce original material available combining skilful
book history research with study of what little information had trickled
through the merciless sieve of nineteenth-century cultural commenta-
tors. Later, scholars such as Anne Humpherys, John Springhall, Helen
R. Smith, and Robert L. Mack, among others, did impressive work cat-
aloguing collections and analysing authors and narratives, contributing
to the gradual rediscovery of this fascinating, but still comparatively
underexplored, corner of Victorian fiction. This book contributes to this
operation of rediscovery. I started working on penny bloods and penny
dreadfuls almost by chance, having never worked on serialized fiction
before. After a first puzzled moment in which I realized that they were
different from any other literary form I had encountered so far (meaning
they were much longer, they rambled, and they made absolutely no sense
if one insisted on reading them as novels), I started formulating the idea
that their relationship with their world—their readership’s world—was
a complex one that involved facts and people belonging to a variety of
spheres, some of them rather unexpected.
On Monday 28 April 1828, the Select Committee on Anatomy,
appointed by the House of Commons to investigate the matter of how
anatomy schools obtained bodies for dissection, started its hearings. The
very first witness had an eminent name: it was Sir Astley Cooper, Bart.,
president of the Royal College of Surgeons, who had acquired his title
after successfully removing a cyst from the sovereign’s scalp. He was also
one of the most prominent anatomists in the kingdom. The Committee’s
proceedings, collected in the Report from the Select Committee on
Anatomy, abound in important names from the world of medicine in the
first decades of the century: John Abernethy, Thomas Southwood Smith,
and Thomas Wakley, among others. On Friday 2 May, though, the last
but one hearing is simply marked as that of ‘A.B.’. To this day, we do
not know this man’s identity, although there are speculations.2 His name
could not be recorded, partly to protect him, but also—and most impor-
tantly—to protect the medical gentlemen whose names appear in the
Report from association with him. Compared to the elaborate wording
of the men who preceded A.B., his answers to the Committee are brief,
PREFACE xi
laconic, and dry. The people in the room despised him, but this man was
essential to dissection activities in the city of London.
‘Is it not’, the Commission asked him, ‘your occupation to obtain
bodies for anatomical schools?’ ‘Yes,’ A.B. replied, ‘it has been for some
years’.
A.B. was a bodysnatcher.
People in his line of business, for this is what it was, stole bodies from
fresh graves at night, and/or obtained fresh bodies by other illicit means3
to sell it to anatomists for dissection. Mostly, they stole the bodies of
the poor, whose tombs were an easier target than those of the better-off.
It was a remunerative trade—too much so for the anatomists, who were
paying increasingly dear prices for ‘dissection material’ sold by night in
the antechambers of their dissection rooms, as the swelling numbers of
medical students required more and more bodies. They had been asking
for an alternative, legal supply of ‘subjects’ since the early years of the
century and, finally, sympathetic political factions were listening to their
pleas, hence the hearings of the Select Committee.
The first time I read the word ‘bodysnatcher’, though, was not in the
Report of the Select Committee for Anatomy, but rather in a penny blood,
Varney the Vampyre; or: the Feast of Blood. As a penny blood, Varney is a
gory, lurid, aesthetically limited serialized story interspersed with super-
natural events, hidden treasures, hanged bodies, and fearful dungeons.
Interestingly, it also features experiments on cadavers: Varney’s body is
galvanized back to life by a medical student in an episode that is redo-
lent of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Much later in the narrative, another
body disappears from its grave, arising suspicions of bodysnatching. As
I explored this genre, I found that resurrected bodies, bodysnatchers,
and unscrupulous doctors appeared in various penny bloods in a sort of
recurring danse macabre, the repetition of which did not only suggest
interest in this triad of figures, but also a common origin in an event,
in a heartfelt reality. The parallel historical research I conducted to bet-
ter understand the nature and working of the bodysnatching business, in
which the three elements appeared to be all simultaneously involved, led
me to the 1832 Anatomy Act.
During his hearing, A.B. was asked: ‘Suppose the bodies of those who
die in workhouses, and have no friends to claim them, were given up, do
you think that the public would be much against that practice?’ To which
A.B. replied that, after being initially ‘prejudiced’, people would finally
‘come round’ and accept it.4 The ultimate goal of the Select Committee