Emmet Reads

Frankenstein…. is in important measure a story about the monstrous practices of grave-robbing, body-theft, and dissection – in short, about corporeal dismemberment. And the resonance of this story owed much to actual phenomena, which became points of contestation at the gallows in eighteenth-century London, as the urban crowd fought to save the bodies of the hanged from anatomists seeking to procure corpses for dissection. For the British working class, anatomists, surgeons and resurrectionists were all part of a general conspiracy to degrade and oppress the poor in both life and death through kidnapping, murder, grave-robbing and dissection. But these popular anxieties about body-snatching involved more, I submit, than the fear of one’s corpse being plundered. With the original accumulation of capital in Britain – principally achieved through dispossessing millions of the poor of their land – huge numbers of people could henceforth survive only by selling their bodily capacities on the labour-market. This unprec- edented and deeply traumatising experience was profoundly resented and contested. And rescuing the corpses of the poor from those who would claim them as private property in order to chop them up offered a rare victory in the battle to save working-class bodies from commodification.

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