Authors: Mark Collins Jenkins
It didn’t help matters, though, if the bodies were missing altogether.
“As the dark nights of the late autumn came on,” wrote Victorian author Thomas Frost of the early years of the 19th century, “the fears of the timid and nervous were doubled, and persons who lived in lonely places, or in the ill-lighted parts of towns, became afraid to leave their houses after nightfall.” They were afraid not of goblins, but of body snatchers.
With the growth of medical schools, and in an era before refrigeration, came the need for a constant supply of fresh corpses for dissection. In England, the bodies of executed criminals had traditionally filled this need. After the British penal code was reformed at the turn of the 19th century, however, drastically curtailing capital punishment, that source effectively dried up. The anatomists then quietly circulated word that they would pay for fresh corpses, no questions asked. Body snatchers, known by the grimly ironic sobriquet of “resurrectionists,” met the new demand.
Bribing cemetery watchmen and wielding quiet wooden spades, they worked in the dead of night. They dug only at the head of a grave and left most of the dirt intact. Using a crowbar, they would snap off the coffin lid, drag out the corpse by hook or rope, strip it of its cerements, sack it, carry it to a waiting hackney coach, and trundle it to the dissecting rooms. Ghoulish, yes, but the work was profitable: A leading resurrectionist once received £144 for 12 subjects in a single night. One body snatcher, when he in turn entered the graveyard (hopefully for good), left his family nearly £6,000.
The fresher the corpse, the better the pay. This led to burking
—
the murderous practice of clapping a pitch plaster over a victim’s nose and mouth, ensuring a speedy death that left few or no signs of the violence responsible. It also produced the freshest corpse possible. Burking was named for William Burke, an Irish ne’er-do-well who, between 1827 and 1828, with his accomplice William Hare, murdered 16 people in Scotland and sold their bodies to an esteemed Edinburgh anatomist, Dr. Robert Knox. The doctor escaped prosecution, Hare turned King’s evidence, and Burke was hanged for the crimes in 1829. In a pitiless twist of lex talionis, Burke’s body was then dissected at the University of Edinburgh, and his skin was made into pocketbooks and other macabre trophies. His skeleton still hangs in the college’s medical school today.
Horrors such as these led to the 1832 Anatomy Act, which expanded the legal options for obtaining cadavers. Body snatching remained a problem, though a lessening one, throughout the century.
In Canada, meanwhile, resurrectionists didn’t even have to dirty their hands; they simply filched corpses from mausoleums in winter, where they had been stacked up to await the spring thaw. In the United States, body snatchers were equally contemptuous of propriety: After a corpse was stolen from the grave next to that of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison in 1878—as the son of President William Henry Harrison and the father of President Benjamin Harrison, John lay in a sealed and guarded brick vault—a vigorous search was launched for the missing body. The seekers never found the ordinary citizen, but to their shock, they discovered a loftier cadaver instead: Congressman John Harrison’s body had been suspended from a rope beneath a trap door inside the Medical College of Ohio. Soon afterward, a letter writer to the Zanesville (Ohio)
Daily Courier
opined:
…our ghouls are no imaginary demons. They walk about among us in broadcloth and kid gloves; physicians and surgeons, with lawyers to defend them, when caught at their obscene work; nice young men, who clerk in stores during the day, take their girls to places of amusement in the evening, and then replenish their depleted pockets by invading the cemeteries, putting hooks through the jaws of our deceased friends, sacking and carting away the bodies, and selling them to Professors of Anatomy for $25.00 a piece!
Grave robbing, though, is as old as burial itself. Long before there were professors of anatomy, there were folk healers. In an 1880 issue of the London
Daily Mail,
there appeared a notice about a “strange and horrible Wendish superstition, which has been handed down from the Pagan ancestors of the Prussians.” The Wends were Slavs living among the Germans of Thuringia, where grave robbing was punishable by life imprisonment:
It is commonly believed among the poorer peasantry of Wendish extraction that several paramount medicinal virtues and magical charms are seated in the heart or liver of a dead maiden or infant of tender years, and that these organs, brewed with certain herbs into a beverage, will cure diseases or inspire the passion of love in their consumers. The practical result of this barbarous belief is the constantly recurrent violation of the grave’s sanctity, and the mutilation of the corpses secretly disinterred from the consecrated ground in which they have been laid to rest. Last week two graves in the new cemetery of Weissensee were broken open during the night, and the coffins contained in them forced, and the bodies of an unmarried girl and a male infant discovered next morning by the guardians of the burial-ground, mangled in the most revolting manner, the cavity of the chest in both cases having been completely emptied of its contents.
B
URY
M
E
D
EEP
In the mid-1840s, those disinclined to pay 12 pence for each new installment of Charles Dickens’s
Dombey and Son
could opt for a far cheaper (in all senses of that word) reading experience. The penny dreadful had arrived, and with it a series of luridly compelling titles:
Wagner the Were-Wolf
;
The Skeleton Clutch, or the Goblet of Gore
;
Sawney Bean, the Man-Eater of Midlothian
;
The Maniac Father, or the Victim of Seduction
; and so on, all vying to dethrone the penny-dreadful king: the 220 chapters on 868 double-columned pages of
Varney the Vampyre
;
or, The Feast of Blood,
once described by literary critic James Twitchell as among the “most redundant, exorbitant, digressive, thrilling, tedious, and fantastic works ever written.”
From the outset, Varney is vampire-as-stage-villain. As he bends over the sleeping “fair Flora” Bannerworth, his face is “perfectly white—perfectly bloodless”:
The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth—the fearful looking teeth—projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like…He drags her head to the bed’s edge. He forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth—a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows.
The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!
On it goes like that—episode piled upon unbelievable episode—as the cadaverous, polite, and exceedingly well-spoken Sir Francis Varney preys on Sir Marmaduke Bannerworth’s family at Bannerworth Hall or is chased over the countryside by enraged mobs. But Varney cannot be killed. Whenever he is cornered or on the verge of expiring, a few moonbeams suffice to revive him—leading to yet more hairbreadth escapes from other ravening mobs: “How frightful is the existence of Varney the Vampyre!”
How confusing, too: At one juncture, Varney is said to have lived in the reign of King Henry IV (1399–1413). Another tale mentions that he died during the Commonwealth (1649–1660), having betrayed a royalist to Oliver Cromwell. Yet a third reveals that Varney was originally hanged as a felon, then revived by galvanism, like Frankenstein’s monster. Or perhaps it was all of the above. From chapter to hastily penned chapter, the author or authors of the Varney yarns could not be troubled to get their story straight. And readers didn’t seem to care.
Where Lord Ruthven had been entirely unsympathetic, Varney becomes the first literary vampire to betray the stirrings of conscience. “I thought that I had steeled my heart against all gentle impulses,” he laments after turning a young girl into a vampire, “that I had crushed—aye, completely crushed dove-eyed pity in my heart, but it is not so, and still sufficient of my once human feelings clings to me to make me grieve for thee, Clara Crofton, thou victim.”
Finally—mercifully—Varney commits suicide. “You will say that you accompanied Varney the Vampyre to the crater of Mount Vesuvius,” he tells his Italian guide, “and that, tired and disgusted with a life of horror, he flung himself in to prevent the possibility of a reanimation of his remains.”
At one point before his final immolation, the narrator muses on this “strange gift of renewable existence,” fed by blood and moonlight (and food, for Varney can eat regular meals, and sunlight, for he is often abroad by day). “Who shall say that, walking the streets of giant London at this day, there may not be some such existences? Horrible thought that…”—and there we might have the seed of Dracula.
Bram Stoker clearly copied a thing or two from
Varney the Vampyre,
though in his hands, the story elements became less melodramatic and more chilling. Varney in
Feast of Blood
has fangs, crawls down castle walls, transforms himself into a bat, and possesses mesmerizing serpent eyes. He turns young Clara Crofton into a vampire, after which she must be staked and destroyed for preying on children. Unlike Béla Lugosi’s Dracula, however, who claims, “I never drink—wine,” Varney enjoys a good glass of claret, “for it looks like blood and may not be it.”
Stoker, a man of the theater, glimpsed the dramatic potential in such details. But he probably never saw a performance of
The Vampire
(1852), yet another play loosely based on Polidori’s work, because the production fared not so well with some highly placed critics: No less an arbiter than Queen Victoria described it in her diary as “very trashy.”
Meanwhile, vampirism had been slipping its moorings in literature and drama. Friedrich Engels, in
The Condition of the Working Class in England
(1844), had described the “vampire middle classes” who bled the workers dry. In 1849, when Karl Marx moved to London, he began working on
Das Kapital
, in which he would proclaim that “capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”
And then there was Emily Brontë’s moody masterpiece,
Wuthering Heights,
published in 1847, while Varney was still on the lam from vindictive mobs. This tale of the tempestuous but doomed love affair between Catherine and Heathcliff, set against the wild, windy splendor of the Yorkshire moors, plays tantalizingly with the vampire motif. Is Catherine, who died of childbirth before the story opens, a ghost or a vampire? She apparently haunts Lockwood, the narrator, as he sleeps in her former bedroom. But when Lockwood rubs the specter’s wrist against some broken window glass, he draws very real blood.
Or does Catherine turn Heathcliff into a vampire? At one point she tells him, “I’ll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won’t rest till you are with me. I never will.” And as he lies dying, Heathcliff turns a bloodless hue, “his teeth visible, now and then, in a kind of smile.”
After Heathcliff ’s death, the nurse, Nelly Dean, speaks with Lockwood:
“Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?” I mused. I had read of such hideous, incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy; and watched him grow to youth; and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror.
The locals, for their part,
do
yield to that horror: “But the country folks, if you asked them, would swear on their Bible that he
walks
. There are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house.”
Emily Brontë knew about vampires, but in many ways, her tale is more effective for
not
being a vampire tale. What might have happened if Bram Stoker had not been a man of the theater, and had preferred the eerie figures of
Wuthering Heights
instead?
G
ATHERINGS FROM
G
RAVEYARDS
As the Victorians were reading their ghost and vampire stories, many doctors were convinced that the dead were literally killing the living.
In a scene from
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens, a burial takes place in an ancient London churchyard, one “pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed…here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two, here sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside, a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.” Gazing at this cemetery, Lady Dedlock, a character in the story, can only exclaim, “Is this place of abomination consecrated ground?”
In the century from 1741 to 1839, when crusading doctor George Alfred Walker published his
Gatherings from Grave Yards,
more than two million people died and were buried in London alone. Walker’s book is a compendium of mortuary horrors: The ancient graveyards were so saturated with the dead that coffins were piled on generations of coffins. In 1845, one gravedigger reported that he unavoidably “severed heads, arms, legs, or whatever came in my way” whenever he had to dig a new grave. “I have been up to my knees in human flesh by jumping on the bodies so as to cram them into the least possible space,” he continued. He dug as many as 45 graves in one day, burying “2,017 bodies, besides stillborns” in a single year.
A visitor to another cemetery described its hideous “bone house,” into which had been dumped the partially decayed remains from such smashed coffins:
[Y]ou may see human heads, covered with hair; and here, in this “consecrated ground,” are human bones with flesh still adhering to them. On the north side, a man was digging a grave; he was quite drunk, so indeed were all the grave diggers we saw. We looked into this grave, but the stench was abominable. We remained, however, long enough to see that a child’s coffin, which had stopped the man’s progress, had been cut, longitudinally, right in half; and there lay the child, which had been buried in it, wrapped in its shroud….