“It is not yet ascertained whence these bodies have been brought, but it is supposed that the Liverpool Workhouse Cemetery has been the principal sufferer. Some of them are so putrid, that it is extremely dangerous to handle them.
BOAG, PRINTER.”
The statements in this broadside are quite true, and agree with the account which is to be found in the Liverpool Mercury for October 13th, 1826. Henderson, who was a Greenock man, and the principal in this business, escaped, and could not be brought to justice; but a man named James Donaldson, who was a party to the transaction, was made to pay a fine of £50, and was sent to Kirkdale Gaol for twelve months.
From Ireland very many bodies were exported, chiefly to Edinburgh; a better price could be obtained there than in Dublin, and the consequence was that the Irish schools were often very badly supplied with subjects. In Dublin there were several ancient burial-grounds, all badly protected; the poor were all buried in one part, and, as their friends were generally unable to afford watchers, their bodies fell an easy prey to the resurrection-men. In January, 1828, the detection of a body about to be exported caused a tumult in the streets of Dublin, and led to the murder of a man named Luke Redmond, a porter at the College of Surgeons.[18] The body-snatchers in Dublin seem to have done more damage than the men engaged in a like occupation in London; they were not content with taking the bodies, but, in addition, they broke the tomb-stones, and played general havoc in the grave-yards.
According to the following cutting from the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal, May 20th, 1732 (printed in Notes and Queries, 5th ser. i. 65), bodies were sometimes taken for other than dissection purposes. “John Loftas, the Grave Digger, committed to prison for robbing of dead corpse, has confess’d to the plunder of above fifty, not only of their coffins and burial cloaths, but of their fat, where bodies afforded any, which he retail’d at a high price to certain people, who, it is believed, will be call’d upon on account thereof. Since this discovery several persons have had their friends dug up, who were found quite naked, and some mangled in so horrible a manner as could scarcely be suppos’d to be done by a human creature.”
Southey also refers to this in the poem before quoted, where he makes the surgeon say in his lamentation,
“I have made candles of infants’ fat.”