THE RESURRECTION MEN

“Body-snatchers and Resurrection Men, ’tis a scandal!” growled Dr. Sam: Johnson in his loud bull’s mutter.

“Oranges! Sweet Chaney oranges!”

The call of the orange-girl rose, filling the theatre in the interval between the tragedy and the afterpiece. It was at the after-piece that my philosophical friend had taken umbrage, for it was announced as The Resurrection of Harlequin Deadman, a theme which Dr. Johnson considered both sacrilegious and inopportune.

“What are these mountebanks thinking of,” he demanded, “to give us another dead man, when the whole town reeks with the grave and the vault, when ghouls and Resurrection Men lift our dead from the earth (shuddering) to be sacked and carried off by night, and carved like mutton by the Anatomist in the morning!”

“Oranges! Sweet oranges!”

The orange-girl was before us, a trim little piece with a dimple beside her bee-stung lip. I longed much to try her mettle, but set up there on publick view, so to speak, in a forward box at Drury Lane Theatre, between two weighty and well-known personages, I hesitated, and she passed on.

Dr. Sam: Johnson, burly and broad, his little brown wig clapped carelessly askew on his head, was known to every tavern and tea-table in town as Ursa Major, the Great Bear, the Grand Cham of Literature.

Our companion, Mr. Saunders Welch, tall, robust, and powerful, with his snowy poll and his round benevolent face, was recognized by the upper and the under world alike as the incorruptible Westminster magistrate, second in command to the Blind Beak of Bow Street himself. Often had the world seen him leading the procession to a Tyburn hanging, black-clad, stately on his white horse, bearing his black baton of office tipped with silver.

Nor was I, I flatter myself, unknown on the London scene: James Boswell, Esq:, of Auchinleck in Scotland, advocate and man of the world, chronicler of the detections of Dr. Sam: Johnson: very much at your service. Many an eye from the stalls was marking my elegant bloom-coloured attire, my swarthy visage set off by powdered clubbed wig, my genteel bearing and complaisant air.

“And what does Bow Street,” my worthy friend was demanding, “to quell these grave-robbing scoundrels?”

“What can Bow Street do?” rumbled Mr. Welch. “These involuntary levitations of inhumated decedents—” He paused impressively, for he loved to outdo Dr. Sam: Johnson himself in the matter of sesquipedalian terminology.

“By which you mean, digging up the dead?” suggested Johnson with a half smile.

“Just so, sir. We do what we can to prevent it. The vaults are concealed, but the Resurrection Men find them out; coffins are sealed, but somehow come unsealed; guards are set, but the Resurrection Men prove stronger. They are persistent, for the traffick is very profitable. The Anatomist pays high for the fresh bodies he dissects.”

“Too much of this,” growled Johnson in revulsion. “Harlequin Deadman, pah! Let us go.”

I had got my friend to vist the theatre by promise of a tragedy of a moral tendency, The Distrest Mother; and now it was over he was little disposed to wait for the harlequinade. But I found myself reluctant to leave my bee-stung charmer unattempted.

“Do, sir,” I perswaded, “do sit on with us, for they say Mr. De Loutherbourg back stage has outdone himself with his scenes and his transformations, his opticks and his mechanicks, his grand effects of light and dark.”

“Well, well, I’ll humour you, Bozzy. Let us see what this Dutchman can do.”

This complaisance enabled me to close with the pretty orange-girl, and privily purchase from her at an inflated rate not only a regale of oranges, but a rendezvous for a later hour at a bagnio hard by Covent Garden. I devoured my orange well pleased.

Suddenly, with a loud groan of the tuba, the musick banged up a grotesque dead march. Salt-box and cleaver beat time, and nimble fingers made the marrow-bones to rattle. Ropes creaked, and the scene-curtain rolled up in Mr. De Loutherbourg’s new manner. The stage lay in darkness. All the candles, at the front and in the wing-ladders alike, had been snuffed. Only a large opal moon gleamed of itself in a black velvet sky.

“’Tis some chymical substance makes it glow,” observed Dr. Johnson, his interest engaged, for he dabbled in chymical experimentation himself.

The dead march swelled, torch-light appeared, and a grotesque funeral procession stalked into view. The children of the company, inappropriately attired as Cupids, capered on first, scattering flowers. Harlequin’s bier was borne on shoulder high, under a diamond-chequered pall. There followed his friends and enemies as mourners, Columbine in her gauzy skirts supported by the noted Grimaldi as Pantaloon, Clown with white-painted face wringing his floury hands, and the rest of the farcical rout. Dr. Johnson snorted. He hates to be reminded that man—even Harlequin—is mortal.

Harlequin under his pall was laid in his grave—that is to say, in the Grave Trap, depressed just deep enough—and the mourners footed it off to a quickstep. De Loutherbourg’s opal moon precipitously declined and set.

In the dead darkness there was a stir. A sheeted figure, gleaming with a luminous moony glow, sat up in the grave. It was startling. Ladies shrieked, men cursed in admiration. Then the figure straightened and stepped up, the glowing cerements were cast aside, and Harlequin stood before us—a skeleton! Every bone gleamed with that same mysterious moonlight glow, the palms of his hand shone, and where the face should have been shimmered the grin of a skull.

“Bravo, De Loutherbourg!” muttered Welch.

“Tschah!” said Johnson, “black body hose and bright paint!”

The musick struck up a weird melody. Wright was Harlequin that night, and his Deadman’s Dance was a triumph of loose shank-bones and prodigious leaps. But Dr. Johnson, finding in it no moral content, could not sit still. When the foolery ended, we hardly stayed to hear tomorrow’s bill announced (Venice Preserved and Harlequin Cherokee) before we escaped ahead of the press.

Outside the theatre, as usual, a mob of riff-raff was gathered, chairmen, link-boys, night-walking wenches, ready-handed rapparees, pimps and pickpockets.

Past us as we left the play-house strolled a youth who engaged my regard, fresh of face, erect of form, lace-ruffled, clad in ivory brocade. Striding easily forward, he came up against a knot of blackguards. There was a jostle. The boy seized a collar and shouted. I thought the word was “Murder!” He was fatally right. A knife flashed, the boy fell, the brawlers melted from sight.

“Halt!” shouted Welch, and gave chase, but in vain. They were gone.

“Zookers, my cousin!” ejaculated a flash-looking bystander in a bag-wig, starting forward. “He’s in a fit! Quick, lads, bear him to the tavern!”

Several hands were reaching for the boy, when past my elbow sped a lady in rose-coloured lutestring, small and daintily formed, her grey eyes enormous in her pale delicate face.

“Stand off!” she cried, and the would-be helpers fell back.

“Patrick!” she breathed, and knelt beside him. He lay as the dead, no breath, no motion. She wrung her hands.

“My son!” she wailed. “What shall I do? He’s dead as his father died, and the body-snatchers will have him as they had his father, and what will become of me?”

“Give place,” said a resonant voice. “I am a surgeon, madam, John Hardiman, at your service. Pray permit me, milady.”

He knelt beside her, a military-looking man of middle height. Soon he rose, shaking his head.

“Lend a hand here,” he cried, “and bear him to my surgery in White Hart Yard, where I may apply my skill to restore him.”

“Never!” cried the lady. “He shall go home, for my house is hard by. Summon a chair!”

“A chair for Lady Julia Fitzpatrick!” voices took up the cry.

“Who is this lady?” I wondered aloud. “And what means her talk of the bodysnatchers?”

“Why, all the world knows Lady Julia Fitzpatrick,” replied Dr. Johnson, “sister to an Earl, wife to the late Fighting Fitzpatrick, the notable Irish duellist. He died last year in a brawl at a tavern, and yon boy, his son, saw him fall. The tale they tell is strange. Fitzpatrick had, they said, his heart misplaced in his breast, an opponent could never nick it. You may imagine how the Anatomist would desiderate such a rarity.”

“Preposterous!” I ejaculated.

“That may be; but preposterous or no, what the world believes, as I observed in the matter of the Monboddo Ape Boy, is a sharp-edged fact upon which a man may cut himself. So it was, perhaps, with Fighting Fitzpatrick. As the story goes, an assassin, instructed by the Anatomist, put a quarrel on him and struck the right spot, ending his days and producing the desiderated cadaver. I know the Sack-em-up Men lifted him, for I saw the empty grave myself, passing by the churchyard of St.-Mark-in-the-Fields, with the coffin riven and empty and the winding-sheet thrown down beside. Small wonder if Lady Julia dreads the Resurrection Men.”

“A shocking story!”

“It is so. And who knows? If Fighting Fitzpatrick proved in fact an anatomical rarity, might not the same Anatomist have a mind to have the boy on his dissecting table, to see if such misplacement runs in families?”

As we spoke thus, two burly bearers edged a sedan-chair with difficulty through the press. Many hands lifted the fallen boy, his brocades now blotched with crimson. The lady ascended the chair, received the inert form beside her, the half-door was fastened, and the chairmen heaved up the poles. The attentive surgeon walked beside.

“Let us go along,” said my benevolent friend with concern, “for I perceive this lady needs a friend.”

I followed along towards Covent Garden; but I had another kind of friend waiting in a bagnio there, and at Lady Julia’s door in Russell Street I parted for the night.

Frustration ensued. My little Cytherean with the dimple, after all, embezzled my gold and left me standing, no doubt following some deeper purse to a more fashionable bagnio; and thus she passes from my story. I went late to my lodging in an evil mood, slept but ill, and rose to melancholy. Then when I called in Bolt Court, looking for the consolations of philosophy, Dr. Johnson was from home.

Not until evening did we meet. We dined together at the Mitre. I was silent as to the perfidious orange-girl; but over a mighty cut off the joint, my benevolent friend adverted to the tragedy at the theatre, and imparted something of its consequences.

“At my urging,” he remarked with satisfaction, “little Davy Garrick at Drury Lane has consented to lay upon the shelf the resurrection of Harlequin Deadman as long as the publick is shocked by the doings of the real Resurrection Men.”

“And what of the bereaved mother, Lady Julia?”

“Calling in Russell Street, I found her resolved that these ghouls shll not have the remains of Patrick. She fears that they may snatch him from the very house of mourning, and perhaps justly so, for certain it is, that it was a body-snatcher’s trick, almost successful, when yon bravo in the bag-wig claimed kin and would have carried him off but for Lady Julia’s arrival. She is made wary. The body has been shrouded and coffined, and the lid made fast, by her own hands. The wake is in progress, and in the morning the body will be consigned to earth, to be kept under strong guard while the cadaver is fresh. Pah! It destroys the appetite!”

My sturdy friend, falling silent, applied an undestroyed appetite to the demolishing of a toothsome veal pye. I lent a hand. Not ’til it was consumed did he lean back with a sigh.

“Come, then, Mr. Boswell, we are expected at Lady Julia’s.”

“What, sir, will you make one at a wake, and join in the pillaloo or Irish howl?”

“I will do more than that for a distrest mother.”

We found Lady Julia’s house decked in deep mourning. Sable crape draped the doorway and muffled the knocker. The door was opened to us by a sombre-clad footman with a pugnacious bog-trotter’s face, and we stood in an entrance hall hung from ceiling to floor with rich mourning trappings laced with silver. From within sounded the low moans and loud howls of the Irish pillaloo.

“Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell, your servant!”

It was the undertaker, swelling and grand in black broadcloth.

“What, good Mr. Blackstock, sir, yours!”

The man was known to us, for we had met at Dilly’s, under more congenial circumstances. Mr. Blackstock, the society undertaker, broad in the shoulder and short in the leg, had a face that reminded me of that pair of Greek masks, one broad grin alternating with a professional countenance of distress. He wore the latter now, mouth corners turned down and eyes turned up.

“A sad occasion, sir,” he intoned; “and,” he added in a confidential murmur, “a strange one. These Irish are too much for me! No expense spared on trappings of woe—” He glanced with approval at the costly velvet hangings. “—night made hideous by heathenish howlings—” The pillaloo rose to a loud keen, wavered, and fell. “No wax figure to display as in my father’s time; no hatchment, no loved countenance preserved through my art; but shrouded, coffined and screwed down in haste, and hugger-mugger off to the grave in the morning! I’ll never understand the Irish!”

“Lady Julia is apprehensive for the safety of the remains,” remarked Dr. Johnson. “And she has cause, sir, she has cause.”

Mr. Blackstock looked put about.

“Most unfortunate, that, sir, last year,” he muttered, “but I did all I could, the usual guards at the grave, spring-guns, and so on; and so I shall again, with close supervision too. Lady Julia may make herself easy.”

“I will tell her so,” said Dr. Johnson.

Mr. Blackstock bent his weeds in a bow that would have done honour to an archbishop, and we passed withinside.

In a parlour hung with black, the coffin stood dark, covered with a rich sable velvet pall. Candles flickered at head and foot. Around it knelt the inferior Irish females of the household, tearing at their dishevelled locks and ululating with a will. Even ladies of the better sort moaned into their pocket handkerchiefs, and gentlemen stood by looking grave. A strong posse of rough-cut Irish footmen put about the consoling glass, and often retired to the kitchen, there presumably to console themselves with similar potations.

In all the hullabaloo, little Lady Julia sat erect, silent, dry-eyed and grim. To my surprise, Dr. Hardiman the surgeon had ingratiated himself, for he stood by her, gently smiling, with hartshorn bottle at the ready, and when her duties called her away, he supported her steps.

With doleful countenance, Mr. Blackstock tiptoed softly among us, distributing the trappings of woe. Elaborate “weepers,” white bows fluttering fringe, soon adorned every arm. Rich mourning garments were passed out, black shammy gloves, Italian crape hat-bands, silk mourning scarves, and the finest of funereal cloaks, black broadcloth from neck to heel, and deep-hooded, to hide the ravages of tears. Tearless, the bereaved mother submitted to be swathed in a long black crape veil.

As the candles paled with the waning of night, the bearers shouldered the coffin and bore it out in the grey of dawn. At the door six black horses waited with the hearse, of carved wood black-painted, and surmounted by a sooty solemn crest of tall nodding feathers. The coffin was slid in. We mounted the mourning coaches, and the cortège paced off to the tolling of the church bells, bearing the slain boy to his resting-place in the churchyard of St.-Mark-in-the-Fields.

St. Mark is no longer in the fields, for the city has moved out that way; but the churchyard still extends alongside, massy wall, ivied lych-gate, solemn yew-tree, old grey tombstones, all very fit for our melancholy obseques.

Of the funeral sermon, whined out with a snuffle by a pursy divine, I say nothing; but at last we stood by the opened grave. A wall-eyed sexton and his muscular helper stood by, looking, I thought, rather too pleased for the nature of the occasion; but no doubt they had been well fee’d.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust—” The first clods fell upon the coffin, and the sexton and his man wielded spades with a will to close the grave. I wondered how soon it would be opened in unholy resurrection.

The mourning coaches departed, but a knot of us lingered: the sexton, Mr. Blackstock and his men, Mr. Saunders Welch, Dr. Johnson and myself. We remained to observe as Mr. Blackstock took his measures for the safety of the cadaver. With his own hands he set the mechanism of a wicked-looking spring-gun. As the wall-eyed sexton stacked his shovels against the wall, still grinning, two rough-clad fellows took up their post by the raw grave. Each was armed with a blunderbuss; but they looked neither intelligent nor resolute. Would they avail to stand off the body-snatchers?

My gorge rose as I imagined to myself the horrid scene—the loose earth shovelled away in hurried silence in the dark of the moon, the rending sound as the coffin is riven, the pallid form torn from its winding-sheet, huddled by brutal hands into a sack; the chink of the Anatomist’s coin as he pays off the criminals, his indecent satisfaction as he bares his scalpel and carves his silent victim like butcher’s meat. No endeavour, no expense, seemed too much to avoid such a fate.

These gloomy reflections haunted me as the daylight hours passed in indifferent affairs. Waiting on Dr. Johnson in Bolt Court as twilight fell, I found that he had apprehensions as gloomy. Trusting as little as I to the abilities of the fellows on guard, he proposed that we should add ourselves, unheralded, to the churchyard watch. Sore against my inclination, but much by my will, I repaired with him to St. Mark’s.

There, unseen, we took up our watch in a corner of the ivy-covered church wall, where in a niche some by-gone vicar had concealed a chill stone seat in the yew-tree’s dusky shade. Our mourning cloaks cloathed us from top to toe in impenetrable shadow. In the moonless night I dimly saw the shape of the fresh grave close by, where in silence the watchers passed and repassed like centinels.

As the hours rolled around, to my imagination the darkness seemed astir all around us. Vapours arose like ghosts and walked among the gravestones. Once I thought I saw a knot of cloaked figures flit through the lych-gate and silently enter the church porch. Once a black-swathed shape rose tall like a spectre behind me. My hair stood up on my head, and my tongue clove to my palate.

“Abate your horripilation, Mr. Boswell,” breathed the apparition, “for I am no noctambulant, only your friend, Saunders Welch, come to bear you company.”

We sat on. The church bell’s solemn chime told hour upon hour. At the dead time of night, at last, a chaise drew up outside the churchyard wall. A moment later, dimly seen figures came over the wall, there was a stir by the grave-side, and we heard the whisper of shovels in loose earth.

“The body-snatchers!” I gasped. “What, sir, shall we not fall upon them?”

“No, sir. To abate this nuisance, we must take them red-handed. Let them dig.”

Mr. Welch growled in his throat, but made no move. In the faint starlight, shovels swung. Piled earth rose. At last, we heard shovel strike upon plank. Then followed the shriek of riven wood. Hands reached down, and slowly the sheeted form rose out of the earth, gleaming with an eerie light. One of the body-snatchers cried out.

“Pah! Afraid of moonlight?” sneered a voice. “Off with the winding, man, make haste!”

Many hands tore at the winding sheet. The gleaming cerements fell away, and there appeared a thing of horror—not a body fresh in its youthful beauty, but a skeleton shining as with the phosphorescent light of decay.

There was a scream, an oath, and the Resurrection Men scattered.

“After them!” I cried.

“Be easy, sir,” said tall Welch. “My men are ready for them. Come along.”

Outside the lych-gate there was a confused scuffle, oaths, the sound of blows. As we passed through, we were surrounded by dark forms of captors and captured.

“You mistake me, good fellows,” cried a resonant voice, “I am no body-snatcher, but Lady Julia’s friend, Dr. Hardiman, come hither in her interest.”

“The surgeon! A friend!” exclaimed the Bow Street man who held him pinioned. “A likely story!”

“See,” said the surgeon with a smile, “my hands are clean.”

In that darkness it was hardly to be seen whether they were or no; but Dr. Johnson assented at once: “They are so. Unhand him, good fellow.”

“And me,” exclaimed another captive whose voice I knew. The starlight fell on the lugubrious face of Mr. Blackstock the undertaker.

“Mr. Welch!” he cried. “Bid these boobies release me, for I come on the same errand as you and the surgeon, to see to my dead-watch and baffle the Sack-’em-up Men, and I desire you’ll release me at once.”

“Stay,” said Dr. Johnson, “look at his hands.”

“They are clean!” cried Mr. Blackstock.

They may have been clean of graveyard mold, but as tall Welch turned up the palms, they glowed weirdly in the dark.

“’Tis enough,” said Dr. Johnson with satisfaction. “You are caught, sir, if not red-handed, yet with traces on your palms put there by Harlequin’s chymically glowing shroud. You are detected, sir; you have gone about to rob your own grave!”

Other glowing palms told the same tale and soon the whole squad of Sack-’em-up Men stood detected. Among them, not at all to my surprise, grinned the sexton. Of course it was he who had disconnected the spring-gun.

“Bravo, Dr. Johnson!” cried a soft voice, as a black-cloaked figure emerged from the church porch. “Your strategem has succeeded!”

Putting back the mourning hood, Lady Julia stood revealed, smiling and sparkling in the faint light that began to grey the East.

“Shall I have no credit?” A second form stood forth. I stared in disbelief—the fine eyes, the fair face—there stood young Patrick Fitzpatrick, whom I thought I had seen laid in the grave!

“I’m not so easy killed,” the boy grinned at my astonishment, “more especially when I find a skilled surgeon to nurse my wound—”

“A meer scratch,” murmured Dr. Hardiman. “And the heart’s in the right place too.”

“To nurse me like a friend,” said the youth with emotion, “nay, like a father—”

“Which I yet shall be,” smiled the surgeon, and the Lady Julia gave him smile for smile.

“So I mended, and ’twas but lying low for some thirty hours by Dr. Johnson’s plan. Nay,” said the youth with a schoolboy’s relish, “’twas a splendid bam! Building up a dummy inside Harlequin’s gear, with my lady mother’s wig stand for a head—and so trapping the villain that stole my father’s body!”

The undertaker cursed to himself.

“And there—” The young voice hardened. “—here stands the scoundrel that murdered him!”

The body-snatcher he pointed to started back with an oath.

“I recognized him in the throng at the theatre, lying in wait for me, I doubt not. But before I could dollar him, he nicked me and got away; and hence comes all the rest of this comedy of Dr. Johnson’s devising.”

“Retribution shall be exacted,” said Mr. Welch. “Conduct them to the round-house.”

“So, boy,” said Dr. Johnson, “our task is done. Thanks to Mr. De Loutherbourg’s chymical paint, which I had of Davy Garrick along with Harlequin’s gear, Mr. Blackstock’s villainy is detected. He will snatch no more by night the bodies he buries by day; and so farewell to the Resurrection Men!”

[The gruesome profession of the Resurrection Men—digging up dead bodies to be sold for anatomical specimens—was a matter of supply and demand. In Dr. Johnson’s day, dissection was legal—if you could get a subject to dissect. Surgeon’s Hall got the cadavers of certain criminals condemned to hanging and anatomizing, but with many private anatomical schools going full blast, there were never enough of them to go round. Resurrection Men supplied the rest.

Contests between the bereaved and the Sack-’em-up Men were macabre. It is told in my husband’s family how his grandfather and great-uncles in Glasgow, armed, stood guard over their mother’s grave by night until they were sure the body had mouldered. Guards, spring-guns, patent-lock iron coffins, “mort-safes” of iron bars, nothing was certain. My story deals with such a contest.

Grave-robbing was worth the effort. A full-grown fresh cadaver might bring four guineas “smalls” one guinea or more according to size. Unique specimens brought more. One anatomist ordered up the body of a man he had operated on twenty-four years before (to see how the patching held up), and it cost him £. 13/12. To obtain the Irish Giant in 1783, Surgeon John Hunter had to pay the dead-watchers a bribe of £500 and transport the naked cadaver in his own coach.

In time, several ingenious Sack-’em-up Men decided it was easier to murder than to dig—Bishop, Williams and May in London, and the famous firm of Burke and Hare in Edinburgh. The exposure of their activities finally brought reform, which put the Resurrection Men out of business. But that is another story.

For more about the Resurrection Men, see James Moore Ball, The Sack-’em-Up Men (Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd, 1928).]