David
Ketterer
"Furnished...Materials":
The Surgical Anatomy Context of Frankenstein
Tim Marshall.
Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein
and the anatomy literature. A Manchester UP book. St. Martin's Press
(800-221-7945), 1995. xiv+354. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.
Murdering to Dissect is an odd
amalgam--or bizarre suturing--of fascinating social history and often shoddy but
"inventive" literary scholarship. There is no question that the criminal
practice of robbing graves in order to provide inquisitive surgeons with corpses to
dissect--a necessary aspect of medical research--is relevant to the basic conception of Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein needs corpses to construct his monster and he gets them in the main
from "vaults and charnel-houses" (Frankenstein, ed. Joanna M. Smith,
54; this is the edition of the 1831 text that Marshall uses and that I shall continue to
cite). At the same time, "The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many
of my materials..." (Frankenstein 56). And he "became acquainted with
the science of anatomy" (Frankenstein 53). But Tim Marshall wants to go
beyond this general observation and link Mary Shelley's novel with the specific historical
events, culminating in the Anatomy Act of 1832, which had to do with how the surgeon's
need for an increasing number of bodies to dissect was met. His argument, however, is not
that Mary Shelley specifically alludes to these events, or in any real way takes account
of them in her major revisions for the 1831 third edition of Frankenstein, but
that the events themselves retrospectively "accent" the 1818, 1823, and 1831
texts of Frankenstein and make possible the allegorical interpretation that
Marshall--with much theoretical massaging--elaborates.
A "Chronology of Events," which
precedes Marshall's exposition proper, begins with the Murder Act of 1752 which made the
medical dissection of all executed murderers compulsory. But there were not enough such
murderers to provide the College of Surgeons--or the Royal College of Surgeons as it
became in 1800--with all the corpses it required and hence the grave-robbing trade. It is
pointed out in the chronology that "More than a thousand corpses a year disappear
from burial grounds in England and Scotland in the first decade of the nineteenth
century" (xiii). But still the demand exceeded the supply. The utilitarian
philosopher Jeremy Benthan believed that people should be encouraged to volunteer their
bodies for dissection after their deaths, and set an example by volunteering his own. In
accordance with his will, his body was publicly dissected after his death in 1832. It was
a short step from digging up corpses for the surgeons to actually creating corpses. The
Irishmen William Burke and William Hare took that step in Edinburgh in 1828 and 1829. The
corpses they sold to the Edinburgh anatomist Dr. Robert Knox were the result of murders
they themselves committed. After Hare turned King's evidence, Burke was hanged and
dissected in Edinburgh in 1829. Back in 1819, the surgeon John Abernethy (whose lectures
Percy Shelley attended in 1811) proposed in print for the first time that pauper bodies be
used for dissection. In 1824, Thomas Southwood Smith published an article recommending
"that all unclaimed bodies from hospitals and workhouses should automatically be
handed over for dissection" (xiii). Smith's article was reprinted as a pamphlet
entitled The Use of the Dead to the Living in 1828, and in 1832, with the passage
of the Anatomy Act (a first version of which failed in 1829) Southwood Smith's
recommendation became a legal requirement. Invariably, after the Anatomy Act, the corpses
made available to surgeons were those of the poor. It was their corpses which were most
likely to be unclaimed by relatives. Instead of being a murderer in order to be a
candidate for dissection, it was now only necessary to be poor. Marshall's chronology
reveals that the Anatomy Act became law on 1 August 1832, shortly after the First Reform
Act which became law on 7 June 1832. Both acts targeted the poor--the first Reform Act
denied them voting rights and the Anatomy Act equated them with the murderers of the 1752
Murder Act. The government sneaked by the horrific Anatomy Act while the nation's poor was
still incensed by the provisions of the First Reform Act.
There are no direct allusions to the events
described above in the three editions of Frankenstein(of course at the time of
the original 1818 edition most of them had yet to come to pass). Nor are there any in Mary
Shelley's letters and journals. I know because I have checked Betty T. Bennett's edition
of the letters and Paul R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert's edition of the journals.
There are no references to any editions of Mary Shelley's letters and/or journals in
Marshall's "Select bibliography," and he gives the unfortunate impression that
his knowledge of their contents depends upon whatever letter and journal quotations happen
to be included in Joanna Smith's Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism edition of the
novel. An example occurs in this quotation from Smith's introduction which is of
particular importance to Marshall's argument:
It is significant that the novel was re-issued in
1831, at a time when "[t]he burnings, the alarms, the absorbing politics of the day
render booksellers almost adverse to publishing at all" (Letters 2.120). The
"politics of the day"...are the increasingly violent public debates over a
Reform Bill whose early version would have enfranchised a portion of the working as well
as the middle class. (Smith 14; quoted, minus the paragraph indentation, Marshall 24)
Marshall claims that both the Anatomy
Bill, which failed in 1829, and the Reform Bill were responsible for the unrest to which
Mary Shelley refers in her letter. So useful are the supposed links between the Anatomy
Bill, the copycat "burkings" of 1831, and Mary Shelley's reference to
"[t]he burnings, the alarms, the absorbing politics of the day" that Marshall
repeats her statement, as quoted by Smith, near the end of his book (310). Had he checked
Volume II of Betty T. Bennett's Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley--and
perhaps he did--he would have seen that the quotation comes from a letter to Edward John
Trelawny dated 27 December 1830 and that, almost certainly, it should be understood in
relation to statements in letters to John Murray (dated 9 August 1830), to General
Lafayette (dated 11 November 1830), and to Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright (both dated
30 December 1830) which all celebrate the July 1830 revolution in France (Lafayette headed
the radical support for Charles X as President of a French republic).
Murdering to Dissect requires a very
suspicious reading. It is necessary to distinguish between reasonable theoretical,
biographical speculations and wire-drawn--often theory-driven--analogies. Among the former
are what may be deduced from the Frankenstein quotations in my first paragraph.
It is certainly relevant to note that grave-robbing was rife in the Scotland that Mary
Shelley knew as a girl and that "Frankenstein's grave-robbing exploits anchor the
story in the medical realities of the day . . ." (5). Frankenstein may reasonably be
described as "a comparative anatomist" (71) and the monster as "the
artificial product of the dissecting room" (69).
But there are many other statements which, if not
exactly untrue, variously stretch the truth. An early example is this sentence: "In
Mary Shelley's tale [which, be it noted, is set in the 1790s], one suggestive--and
provocative-- scenario transforms the story into a plausible cameo of the late 1820s: the
appearance of corpses which continuously turn up in close proximity to the surgeon
Frankenstein, as if in delivery to him" (11). The shaky allegorical notion here that
the corpses in Frankenstein should, in the light of historical events related to
the dissection question, be understood as "delivered to the anatomist" (32) is
further repeated at least three times (108, 134, 139). It may well be, as Marshall claims,
that "Mary Shelley's story is haunted by the spectre of death in poverty"
(147)--an understandable enough human fear--but is it so in Frankenstein because
dissection would be the inevitable consequence? After "delivering" the corpse of
Elizabeth, Frankenstein's new "gallows bride," the monster,
With a parting gesture...figures as the angry
gallows crowd of the early eighteenth century. Appearing to Frankenstein's sight, he
'jeers' and, in a claiming gesture, points to the corpse as one of his own. (159)
The "figure" in this quote of the
monster as the proletarian crowd of potential pauper dissectees is crucial to the
development of Marshall's thesis. The monster, it is repeatedly stated (55, 125, 158, 169,
226) is, in effect, more than one person; he is an assemblage of corpses; he is therefore
the crowd. With this "established," Marshall liberally incorporates the
Foucault-influenced theory of Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power--with assists from
Michel de Certeau and Bakhtin--and away we go.
The ground rules of interpretation have changed
considerably over the past twenty years. At issue is what constitutes evidence. The kind
of analogical argument that abounds in Murdering to Dissect is today pretty much
the norm and no doubt many readers, given the appropriate post-structuralist assumptions,
will be more favourably disposed towards its endlessly generative analogies than I am.
What used to be strained is now liberating. A good example is Marshall's treatment of the
"hulks," as the moored, rotting ships used as overcrowded prisons were called:
"In 1815 there existed five hulks holding around 2,500 convicts; by 1828 ten hulks
held around 4,500" (185). Among eleven very interesting illustrations in his book,
Marshall reproduces on page 186 E.W. Cooke's painting "H.M.S. York as a hulk
at Portsmouth, 1818." Because of the overcrowded conditions, the mortality rate on
these hulks was very high and thus they provided "a convenient source of [young]
corpses for the [dissection] slab" (187). Mary Shelley does not use the word
"hulk" to describe the monster but obviously, given his size and general
physical appearance, he is a bit of a hulk so Marshall goes on to state that "The
figurative hulk in Frankenstein is of course the nameless Creature [the
politically correct term for the monster] himself" (187); he later says that
"Frankenstein creates a great 'hulk'..." (226). Call me old-fashioned but I find
this far-fetched.
The prisoners aboard the hulks died of diseases
caused by overcrowding and insanitary conditions. It was not yet understood when Frankenstein
was written that diseases were caused by germs often related to vermin. The term
"vermin," of course, can be related to human beings as well as rodents.
Consequently and anachronistically, Marshall feels justified in applying Canetti's
metaphorical theories about germs to Frankenstein's fear that his monster and potential
mate will spawn "a race of devils" (Frankenstein 140). Translating all
the analogies, the working class and the poor (both represented by the monster), are to be
equated with "rampantly procreating bacilli." "The developments in Frankenstein
which are the work of the Creature's hand can be cast into a 'germ-ism' scenario of the
invisible enemy" (243).
According to Marshall's summation,
The historical monster in Frankenstein is the
1832 Anatomy Act, the lineaments of which were assembled after the story appeared in 1818.
The resurrectionist culture Mary Shelley grew up in . . . is present in Victor
Frankenstein's famous nocturnal visits to graveyards. But history recasts Frankenstein
after Burke and Hare.... In this book I have tried to read the script which history put
into the tale of Frankenstein. (327-28)
Certainly, Marshall does demonstrate that, if
one wishes, the dissection issue and the activities of Burke and Hare (and others)
can be used, and could have been so used by some of the book's early readers, to
"rewrite" Frankenstein, i.e., to generate a new and interesting
interpretation of the novel. But there is no evidence--as Marshall himself admits--that
that interpretation had anything much to do with Mary Shelley's intentions, insofar as
they can be persuasively reconstructed. But the work itself is always amenable to new
readings. If one wishes, a reader may understand "The hare mockingly offered to
Frankenstein" as "a metonymy of the reversal crowd [a term drawn from Canetti's
theory]" (291). Marshall is referring here to the final pursuit when the monster
leaves Frankenstein "a dead hare" (Frankenstein 171) to eat. But one
wonders why Marshall did not go the additional distance and allow history to rewrite this
hare so that it is understood as a mocking figure for William Hare!
Finally, there is something misshapen and
distorted about Murdering to Dissect. It is not really a book about Frankenstein.
It is really a very interesting and engagingly written work of cultural history dealing
with the anatomy legislation, its context, and related literary works, including Frankenstein.
For much of this material Marshall is indebted, as he acknowledges, to Ruth Richardson's Death,
Dissection & the Destitute (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989). He thanks her
"for commenting on the book's final draft" (xii). Marshall has useful things to
say about various dissection-related publications such as De Quincey's On Murder
Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827, 1839), Dickens' Barnaby Rudge
(184O), and Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848). A better book would have resulted
had Marshall simply treated Frankenstein as one further such example and not
over-inflated that case by making it the primary subject of his book. Marshall has taken
what should have been an article on Frankenstein and, with too much repetition,
combined it with what should have been a general sociological/cultural/literary study in a
way that seriously skews the relative weights of the two components.
WORKS CITED
Canetti, Elias. Crowds and Power. Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1981.
The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Ed. Betty T. Bennett. 3 vols. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 1983,
and 1988.
Mary Shelley. Frankenstein. Ed. Joanna
M. Smith. Case Studies in Contemporary Literature. Boston: Bedford Books, 1992.
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