Gosling and his confederates were brought to trial, and confessed their guilt, and even revelled in their horrible reminiscences. Gosling grimly recalled how on one night the resurrection party had been so drunk that they had fought in an open grave under the shadow of the church.
This took place in 1830. Gosling and his confederates were transported.
It was not till 1832 that Mr. Warburton’s Bill, already referred to, passed both Houses; and public feeling had been further stirred on the subject by the case of Bishop and Williams, who had murdered an Italian boy in London for the sake of providing a subject for S. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and Bishop had admitted that he had committed sixty such murders.
The objection raised to the Bill in the House of Lords in the first instance, and again in the second, was that Warburton’s project was that such persons as died in a hospital, and whose bodies were not claimed by relatives, should be given up for dissection. What the Lords objected to was that this subjected the poor to what might be considered an evil in which the rich did not participate. But the serious condition of affairs, the evidence that many murders were committed so as to provide the anatomical schools with subjects, overrode the sentimental feeling, and the Bill passed. Happy indeed would it have been if it had passed thirty years earlier.
“THE BEGGARS’ OPERA” AND GAY’S CHAIR
It is not my intention to give a detailed biography of John Gay, for such is easily procurable, either in Cox’s Life of the poet, or in the Dictionary of National Biography, or, again, in the Life, prefixed to his works, by J. Underhill, 1893. All here proposed is to give a brief sketch, and fill out two points, the story of The Beggars’ Opera, and that of the discovery of MSS. in Gay’s chair.
The Gays of Goldsworthy were an ancient Devonshire family, tracing back in direct descent from a John Gay, already seated in his warm nest at Goldsworthy, in Parkham, near Bideford, a parish that nursed as well the Giffards of Halsbury and the Risdons of Babley. But if Parkham nursed these families, it did not keep them; Giffards, Risdons, Gays are all gone, and the Gays had sold Goldsworthy before Risdon wrote his Survey between 1605 and 1630. But the Gays still retained the old priory of Frithelstock which they held on a long lease from 1602, and where lived the widow of a Gay in 1822, when Lysons published his “Devonshire” in Magna Britannia.
John Gay was the son of William Gay, fourth son of John Gay of Frithelstock. William had married the daughter of a Dissenting preacher named Hanmer, in Barnstaple, and there John was born on 30 June, 1685. William Gay died when John was but ten years old, and he was brought up by his mother in Ivy Street, Barnstaple, and sent to school to Robert Luck, a would-be poet, who wrote Latin and English verses, in one of which, “The Female Phæton,” he depicted the career and lapse of a fast young lady of fashionable life.