"trading in death": contested commodities in "household words"

"Trading in Death": Contested Commodities in "Household Words"Author(s): Catherine WatersSource: Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 313-330Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of the Research Society for VictorianPeriodicalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083971 .

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"Trading in Death": Contested Commodities in

Household Words

CATHERINE WATERS

In his final will and testament, Dickens issued the following order:

I emphatically direct that I be buried in an inexpensive, unostentatious, and

strictly private manner; that no public

announcement be made of the time or place

of my burial; that at the utmost not more than three plain mourning coaches be

employed; and that those who attend my funeral wear no scarf, cloak, black bow,

long hat-band, or other such revolting absurdity. I DIRECT that my name be

inscribed in plain English letters on my tomb, without the addition of "Mr." or

"Esquire". I conjure my friends on no account to make me the subject of any

monument, memorial, or testimonial whatever.... (qtd. in Forster 421-2)

Dickens's emphatic directive regarding the form of his own burial attests to his well-known dislike of the elaborate customs associated with the "respectable" Victorian funeral. His fictional undertakers - Mr Sow

erberry in Oliver Twist, Mr Mould in Martin Chuzzlewit, Mr Omer in David Copperfield, and Mr Trabb in Great Expectations

- are depicted with something of that "attraction of repulsion" which characterised his fascination with the dead and death more generally. As Harry Stone has

noted, the name of Sowerberry conveys Dickens's obsession with canni balism in combining the notion of something unpleasant to eat (sour

berry) with its "darker, less obvious homonyms" of sower or burier of

corpses (82). Such corpse-devouring also underlies the description of Mr

Mould enjoying his "cool, transparent" glass of punch amidst the "sweets

of domestic repose" (Dickens, Chuzzlewit 345): while he beams lovingly at Mrs Mould, says the narrator, "from the distant shop a pleasant sound arose of coffin-making with a low melodious hammer, rat, tat, tat, tat, alike promoting slumber and digestion" (346). In these fictional portraits,

Dickens exploits the contrast between awareness of the horrors of the



314 Victorian Periodicals Review 36:4 Winter 2003

corpse and the familiar routines of the funeral parlour, between the sacred

mystery of death and the secular commercial interests of the trade, as part of his satire on the commodification of death.

Dickens also filled Household Words with articles about bodies, funer

als, graveyards, monuments, epitaphs, and the like, many of which show a

similarly ambivalent response to trading in death and raise wider ques tions as to how far society should go in permitting people to buy and sell

goods and services, how far the laissez-faire market should extend. That

Household Words should be so thoroughly engaged with such issues is no

mere coincidence. The journal appeared in the 1850s at a key moment in

the emergence of commodity culture in Victorian England. As Thomas

Richards has shown, the Great Exhibition of 18 51 marked a watershed in

the development of a specifically capitalist form of representation cen

tring upon the spectacle of the commodity. It was, he says, "the first out

burst of the phantasmagoria of commodity culture" (18): while "the

Victorian taste for luxury, ostentation, and outward show had long been

reflected on the stage as well as one the street and inside the home," "what the Crystal Palace did [he argues] was to synthesize and systematize these

elements of spectacle by putting them all together under one roof in the

service of manufactured objects" (21). A glance at the contents of House

hold Words reveals many articles thematising commodity culture in one

way or another: biographies of second-hand or pawned goods, stories

spun from advertisements, process articles describing visits to manufacto

ries, tales of the flaneur and of those residual or marginal economies in

which waste is recycled. The discussion of trading in death in Household

Words is a particularly interesting example of the journal's representation of commodity culture, revealing, as it does, instances of conflict or ten

sion concerning the commodity status of the goods and services involved. This paper focuses on three areas of conflicted trade - the commercial

development of the Victorian funeral, including both the state and the

"respectable" funeral; the growth of commercial cemeteries; and body

snatching and the commodification of corpses - all of which represent, to

use the term employed by property law theorist Margaret Jane Radin, "contested commodities" (xii-xiii). All of these examples concerning the

Victorian management of death show the widening scope of the market in

the nineteenth century, as an increasing range of objects and relationships came to be identified and treated as marketable goods and services. They also illuminate some of the issues that were at stake in the development of

commodity culture at mid-century. In the essay from which I take the first part of my title, "Trading in

Death," Dickens vehemently attacks the theatrical ostentation and com

mercialisation of the state funeral provided for the Duke of Wellington. Written on the eve of Wellington's funeral and published as the leader in



CATHERINE WATERS 315

Household Words on 27 November 1852, the article begins by detailing a

range of abuses associated with the Victorian management of death: Dick ens inveighs against the "system of barbarous show and expense" associ ated with the "respectable" funeral, describing it as an association of the

most solemn of human occasions with unmeaning mummeries, dishonest

debt, profuse waste, and bad example in an utter oblivion of responsibil ity"; he rails against the predatory practices encouraged by Burial Clubs for the poor; the long file of middlemen associated with funeral furnish

ing; and the sanitary problems caused by intramural burial; before finally

identifying the "culminating point of this gigantic mockery" in the state

funeral ("Trading" 241).1 Deploring the way in which this event "encour

ages these shameless traders in their dealings on the very coffin-lid of

departed greatness," his article conveys a fear of degeneration, of a return to barbarism, that echoes the anxieties expressed in his powerful novelis tic response to the Great Exhibition, Bleak House, then in progress, with its famous opening scene of London mired in primal mud and fog. The

decomposition of the Duke's body and contemporary fears about the

proximity of decaying flesh provide a subtext to these anxieties concern

ing degeneration; for although he died on 14 September 1852, the Duke was not buried for another two months because the state funeral desired

by the Queen required the formal approval of the November meeting of Parliament.2 Dickens deplores the long-deferred state funeral for the

political ends he insinuates have been served by its postponement, and, more particularly, for awakening the "general trading spirit" all too evi

dent in the advertising columns of the Times.

Wellington's funeral has received renewed critical attention in recent

years as part of a scholarly interest in what Tony Bennett has referred to as "the exhibitionary complex" (59-88). It was, as Harry Garlick notes, "the greatest spectacle of the Victorian Age, and a significant expression of the national psyche" (59). In his book on the Illustrated London News, Peter Sinnema observes that Wellington's funeral was "an arguably grander spectacle" (180) than the Great Exhibition. Moreover, he notes, "exhibition and public commemoration for the heroic dead can ... be read as parts of the same cultural spectrum" (202m). Like the Great Exhibi

tion, Wellington's funeral was to showcase British arts, craftsmanship, and technology (Garlick 73). Both deployed the cultural form of spectacle - that mode of amplification and extravagance found elsewhere in popular theatrical performances featuring elaborate special effects, and in the

crowd-pulling panoramas, dioramas, and cycloramas of the period. A

panorama of Wellington's funeral procession, incorporating "moving fig ures," was in fact exhibited at the Royal Assembly Rooms, Newington Causeway, in February 1854. Thus both Exhibition and state funeral fos tered the pleasure of consuming displays. Just as the visitors to the Crys



3i6 Victorian Periodicals Review 36:4 Winter 2003

tal Palace paid money for the privilege of wandering its aisles, mourners

eager to see the state funeral procession had their pleasure as spectators

regulated according to how much they could or were willing to pay for seats (Sinnema 182).

These elements of commodity spectacle emerge in Dickens's attack

upon the funeral in Household Words. He derides the strategies employed

by the advertisers in the Times, who use a form of merchandising, a way of talking about commodities, that, according to Thomas Richards, was a

legacy of the Great Exhibition. Many of the Times advertisements exploit the occasion of Wellington's funeral to endow their goods with symbolic value, appealing to nationalist sentiment, to the patriotic consumer who wants to be seen to be part of this great commemorative event. In "Trad

ing in Death," Dickens's scorn for the announcements regarding comesti

bles condemns the cannibalistic nature of such merchandising techniques, as traders exploit the cultural capital of the Duke's name to sell their

wares: he deplores the "The Duke of Wellington Funeral Wine" and

"Funeral Cake," together with the "'celebrated lemon biscuits' at one and

fourpence per pound, which were considered by the manufacturer as the

only infallible assuagers of the national grief." In the typography of his

article, Dickens reproduces the display technology of the Times's print advertisements: use of various print sizes, capitalisation, italics and so on, to highlight desirable features in the commodities put up for sale. Such

display strategies were a crucial component in the development of com

modity culture in Victorian England. In a fascinating article comparing

early forms of museum organisation with modem computer interfaces,

Judith Roof has described the historical evolution of physical strategies of

display in relation to developing technologies and forms of visuality. She

points out the way in which, after the late-seventeenth century, "display became increasingly separable from the object displayed, becoming visi

ble in itself as display" (118ns). Nineteenth-century print advertisements, with their mixture of iconography and letterpress, also demonstrate this

emerging mode of exhibition, which can be seen - albeit at a rudimentary

stage in the print advertisements relating to Wellington's funeral in the

Times. Dickens's article quotes more than three dozen of these advertise

ments, with commentary occasionally interspersed to highlight the most

piquant absurdities.

For example, among the list of advertisements proffering rooms and

windows to let along the procession route, Dickens remarks the follow

ing "NOTICE TO CLERGYMEN":

T. C. Fleet Street, has reserved for clergymen exclusively, upon condition only that

they appear in their surplices, FOUR FRONT SEATS, at ?1 each; four second

tier, at 15s. each; four third tier, at 12s. 6d.; four fourth tier, at 10s.; four fifth tier,




at 7s.6d.; and four sixth tier, at 5s. All the other seats are respectively 40s., 30s.,

20S., 15s., ios. ("Trading" 242)

He comments:

The anxiety of this enterprising tradesman to get up a reverend tableau in his

shop-window of four-and-twenty clergymen, all on six rows, is particularly com

mendable, and appears to us to shed a remarkable grace on the solemnity. (242)

The ambiguity evident here in the use of shop windows - as a space reserved for a tableau of clergymen or as a vantage point for viewing the

funeral parade - and the duplication of sightlines involved, increase the

emphasis upon spectacle, upon the transformation of the Duke's funeral

into what Dickens describes as a "Public Fair and Great Undertakers'

Jubilee," by confusing or multiplying the objects of display.3 Several of

the advertisements for seats quoted here proffer shop windows as vantage

points in this way, their emphasis upon the presence of plate-glass sug

gesting the ambiguous function of the window. The introduction of

mass-production techniques for the manufacture of plate-glass in the

mid-1830s transformed the nature of the display window, enhancing the

exhibition value of the goods arranged behind it: "While previously it had been little more than an ordinary window that permitted people to see

into and out of the shop, it now became a glassed-in stage on which an

advertising show was presented" (Schivelbusch 146). The advertisements

for seats exploit the presence of plate-glass as a display technology to pro duce a peculiarly reversible dynamic between viewer and viewed, between subject and object. These advertisements register not only the

spectator's promised pleasure in viewing the Duke's funeral from the best

position, but also the desire to be viewed. Freud describes this as the "reversal of affect" - the idea that the aim of any instinct may be reversed into its opposite

- and notes that the instincts of exhibitionism and voy eurism are therefore intimately related: the voyeur really wants to be looked at (77-9). As Judith Roof has noted, such a dynamic of voyeurism,

operating within nineteenth-century display technologies, met the "needs

of a nascent and discerning commodity culture" (105).4 For what Dickens

is registering here is not just a generic desire to be viewed, but a form of

desire specific to commodity culture: the "Notice to Clergymen" appeals to the consumer who wants to be viewable as one who has paid for a

prime location at Wellington's funeral procession. The advertisement fig ures a certain kind of consuming subject whose desire to be seen as such

will lure him to pay for the privilege of forming part of an advertising tab

leaux in T. C.'s shop window. A large group of advertisements, quoted by Dickens, concern the sale



3i8 Victorian Periodicals Review 36:4 Winter 2003

of letters or autographs of the Duke, and like the advertisements for seats, these too show evidence of emergent strategies for attracting customers in

the discourses of display. These letters are various, their value held to be

distinguished by a range of factors including date, length, subject matter, and the presence or absence of an envelope with seal and post mark intact.

But while individual advertisers try to draw the eye of potential custom

ers in competition with one another in this way, all stress the value of the

autograph they have for sale as "original" and as "characteristic" of the

Duke's "peculiar style" (243). The autographs are proffered as synecdo ches for the Duke, captivating the desire of consumers with the object's allure as a trace of authentic experience of British heroism. In some adver

tisements these letters are offered as positional goods - their alleged rarity

enhancing the value they carry as potential markers of social distinction -

while in others the appeal is to the charitable impulses of the consumer.

For example, an autograph letter "written in 1830, enclosed and directed in an envelope, and sealed with his ducal coronet" is offered by "A

widow, in deep distress" who would "be happy to PART WITH" this treasure "for a trifle." Other advertisements proffer relics of the Duke:

secondhand clothing or locks of hair. Amongst these relics, Dickens high

lights one particularly unique memento:

La morte de Napoleon, Ode d'Alexandre Manzoni, avec la Traduction en

Francais, par Edmond Angelini, de Venise. - A book, of which the above is the

title, was torn up by the Duke and thrown by him from the carriage, in which he was riding,

as he was passing through Kent; the pieces of the book were collected

and put together by a person who saw the Duke tear it and throw the same away.

Any person desirous of obtaining the above memento will be communicated with.

("Trading" 244)

While not all of the advertised mementoes of the hero of Waterloo were

so risible, as Thomas Richards notes, from the Great Exhibition "adver

tisers learned that the best way to sell people commodities was to sell

them the ideology of England" (5). Wellington's commodification as the

defender of national freedom thus highlights the continuum between the

Exhibition and state funeral as forms of commodity culture.

Such trade in relics of the dead is described in another Household

Words article dealing with memorial customs. In "Burns. Viewed as a

Hat-Peg," published on 12 February 1859, Wilkie Collins criticises the

commercial exploitation of the memory of Robert Burns in various com

memorative celebrations marking the centenary of the poet's birth.

According to Collins, "the honour of discovering that the memory of

Burns might be profitably used in the capacity of a Hat-Peg rests with the

Directors of the Crystal Palace Company," who have sought to make




money by offering cheap musical entertainment and a taste of "cock-a

leekie and haggis, at three shillings a head" in "honour" of Burns (241). But the "new use [thus] found out" for Burns is not confined to the entre

preneurial activities of joint-stock companies, and Collins describes a

number of commemorations, throughout England and Scotland, at which

relics of Burns were exhibited: "his hair, his toddy-ladle, his wife's hair, his snuff-box, his pistols, his punch-bowl, and even a print over which he

is reported to have once shed tears, were all displayed at different places," writes Collins.

But the Edinburgh Gathering went a step further, and exhibited a living relic, in

the shape of a poor old man, who had lived one hundred years in this weary world, and who at that great age was hung up in public

on the Hat-Peg, because

he had been brought, as a carrier, into personal

contact with Burns, as an excise

men. It seems scarcely consistent with the respect and the consideration which are

due to great age to make a show of this old man; and, when one assembly had

done staring at him, to pass him on to another. (242)

Both Collins and Dickens object to the lack of respect for personhood shown by the exhibition and trade of relics. They draw upon a rhetoric of

humanism and an ideology of separate spheres to describe the processes of fetishism and reification involved in the growth of commodity culture

and its transgression of the boundary between private and public, family and market. Collins remarks the objectification of the old man who is

"passed" on from one exhibition to another, while Dickens writes that

"the sanctity of a seal, or the confidence of a letter, is a meaningless phrase that has no place in the vocabulary of the Traders in Death" ("Trading" 243). This kind of trade is regarded as an invasion of privacy, because it

involves treating parts of the deceased hero's identity as alienable com

modities: a "new use" found out in "great men" as Collins puts it. The value of these sorts of commodities depends upon the way in which cer

tain categories of property are bound up in historically and culturally spe cific ways

- with the constitution of the self, thus raising questions about

the ethics of commodification. As Margaret Jane Radin explains,

In human life as we know it, self-constitution includes connectedness with other

human beings and also with things in the world, with a home, for example. ...

When an item of property is involved with self-constitution in this way, it is no

longer wholly "outside" the self, in the world separate from the person; but nei

ther is it wholly "inside" the self, indistinguishable from the attributes of the per son. Thus certain categories of property can bridge the gap or blur the boundary between the self and the world, between what is inside and what is outside, between what is subject and what is object. (57)




Personal relics represent one such category of property. The ambivalent status of the personal relic is captured elsewhere in

Household Words in Dickens's remarkably vivid descriptions of the cloth

ing of dead people. In "Lying Awake," his fascination with the Paris

Morgue leads to a recollection of its "ghastly beds, and the swollen satu

rated clothes hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping all day long, upon that other swollen saturated something in the comer, like a heap of

crushed over-ripe figs that I have seen in Italy!" (147). In "Railway Dream

ing," he remembers the keeper of the morgue surrounded by "a library of

mysterious books. ... From pegs and hooks and rods, hang, for a certain

time, the clothes of the dead who have been buried without recognition.

They mostly have been taken off people who were found in the water, and are swollen (as the people often are) out of shape and likeness" (388). In

these articles, Dickens's experience of a liminal state between sleeping and

waking makes him peculiarly susceptible to recollections of the morgue and that unique transitional object within it, the corpse. His memory reg isters a kind of ontological instability as the identity of the corpse and its

clothing become interchangeable: the boundary between the self and its accoutrements has been dissolved. One thinks too of Pip's unease, visiting

Newgate, when he notices the Lord Chief Justice's proprietor wearing "mildewed clothes, which had evidently not belonged to him originally, and which, I took it into my head, he had bought cheap of the executioner"

(Dickens, Great 164). In all of these examples, Dickens remarks the infu

sion of selfhood into attire, the "lingering traces of identity in the clothing of the dead" (Vrettos 408). Such relics are shown to be implicated in self

constitution and thus cannot be valued solely in market terms: they are, to

use Radin's description, "incompletely commodified" (102). While Dickens's attack upon Wellington's state funeral raises questions

about the relationship between commodification and identity in a partic

ularly acute way, his protest against trading in death continues elsewhere

in Household Words's critique of the commercial imperatives associated

with the "respectable" funeral. For example, the journal carried two arti

cles in support of the General Interment Bill which was before Parliament

in June 1850, both of which reveal the ways in which issues of class inflect

the commodification of death and the social meaning attached to funerals

as occasions for representing identity. The first of these, written by Dick

ens and published on 8 June 1850, "From the Raven in the Happy Fam

ily," employs the voice of a Raven, whose carrion-eating nature is used to

offer ironic support for the undertakers who "furnish" the "respectable" funeral. The Raven bluntly identifies the cultural meaning of the funeral

as a consumer good that defines the social place of the deceased and his or

her family as members of what he calls the "gen-teel party." He satirises

the use of middlemen in funeral "performance," observing the role of the



CATHERINE WATERS 3"

"Black Jobmaster" who had "let the coaches and horses to a furnishing undertaker, who had let

" 'em to a haberdasher, who had let 'em to a car

penter, who had let 'em to the parish-clerk, who had let 'em to the sex

ton" and so on, in a long list recalling the House that Jack built (242). The

range of funereal consumer goods required to furnish a respectable funeral is comically indicated in an exchange between the undertaker and

a neighbour of "Mrs Grundy":

"Hearse and four, Sir?" says [the Black Jobmaster to the bereaved gentleman].

"No, a pair will be sufficient." "I beg your pardon, sir, but when we buried Mr.

Grundy at number twenty, there was four on 'em, Sir; I think it right to mention

it." "Well, perhaps there had better be four." "Thank you, Sir. Two coaches and

four, Sir, shall we say?" "No. Coaches and pair." "You'll excuse my mentioning

it, Sir, but pairs to the coaches and four to the hearse, would have a singular

appearance to the neighbours. When we put four to anything, we

always carry

four right through." "Well! Say four!" "Thank you, Sir. Feathers of course?"

"No. No feathers. They're absurd." "Very good, sir. No feathers?" "No." "Very

good, sir. We can do fours without feathers, Sir, but it's what we never do. When

we buried Mr. Grundy, there was feathers, and - I only throw it out, Sir

- Mrs

Grundy might think it strange." "Very well! Feathers!" "Thank you, Sir," -

and

so on. (241-2)

The power of fashion to compel excessive funeral expenditure, even

amongst those who cannot afford it, is attacked again in a second article

on the Interment Bill published later the same month. In a mock

"Address from an Undertaker to the Trade (Strictly Private and Confi

dential)," Percival Leigh impersonates an undertaker protesting against the General Interment Bill as likely to destroy his trade.5 As his under

taker-narrator is made to acknowledge, "we have always considered that a funeral ought to cost so much to be respectable at all. Therefore rela

tions have gone to more expence with us, than they would otherwise have

been willing to incur, in order to secure proper respect" (303). In an era

when social mobility could be achieved through acquired wealth, the

funeral became a locus of anxiety as funeral expenditure provided a final

judgement upon one's standing in the community (Lacqueur 115), and

Household Words satirises this cultural practice. Dickens identifies the elaborate "furnishing" associated with the

respectable funeral as a preoccupation with ornamentation and display that partakes of fetishism; and similar concerns emerge in Household

Words's discussion of the growth of commercial cemeteries. While sup

porting the commercial activity of cemetery companies as an attempt to

solve the sanitary problems associated with overcrowded city church

yards, Household Words nevertheless expresses concerns about the




transformation of the burial place into apiece of real estate, a consump tion good, and about the forms of commodity spectacle associated with

cemetery development. In "Deadly Lively" (25 March 1854), for example, William Blanchard Jerrold describes the way in which the great metropol

itan cemeteries in Paris had become pleasant holiday venues, places of

entertainment and leisure as much as commemoration. Sketching the tab

leaux formed by various mourners, and speculating about their stories, the narrator in "Deadly Lively" seems to experience the cemetery at

Montmartre as a mode of exhibition or theatre. He describes the variety of shops serving visitors to the cemetery

- "stalls devoted to the sale of

sweetmeats," "restaurants offering a formidable list of plats at wonder

fully low prices," beer and spirit shops, and traders selling immortelles:

From the first floor to the ground, arranged in patterns the most fantastic, and in

colours most grateful, are hung thousands of [these] immortelles, or circular rolls

of baked and dried flowers. And, judging by the brisk trade that is going on, the

stranger will not think that the supply exceeds the demand by a single immortelle.

(139)

While insisting upon his sympathetic observation of the commemorative customs he describes, the language of commodification betrays the narra

tor's unease: he observes, for example, a "hearty, lively bonne" approach the immortelle magazine, who "looks in a very business-like manner at

the varieties of eternal emblems about her, as she would look at a cap ribbon."

Jerrold's discordant simile implies disapproval of the preoccupation with ornamentation and display he sees in the cemetery

- a preoccupation that is also identified as a matter for concern by James Hannay in his dis

cussion of monuments and gravestones in "Graves and Epitaphs" (16 October 1852). Hannay's article expresses some anxiety about the secu

larisation of death and commemoration brought about by the cemetery movement. He discusses the importance of correct "taste" in the monu

mental design of London's new commercial cemeteries, arguing "how

absurd is a monument that symbolises nothing but the statuary's bill ."

He distinguishes between "a natural and an unnatural style of ornament"

in the composition of epitaphs and objects to the use of wit in epigraphy as a form of fetishism in which the person to be commemorated is "com

pletely sunk into the position of an object of the writer's ingenuity": instead of evoking a properly reflective disposition in the viewer, "In

looking at [such a] monument," he writes, "you think only of the statu

ary" ( 107).7 Similarly, he complains that the use of such decorative fea tures as stone canopies, pillars and sham urns in tomb design turns

commemoration into spectacle: "you attract

passers-by, not to pause rev



CATHERINE WATERS 3*3

erently and merely to look, but to stare in a dilettante fashion, as if they were in a wax show" (i 08). For Hannay, the obtrusive materiality of the monument converts what should be respectful private tribute into public

display. Commodity culture, it seems, distorts the commemorative func

tion of the cemetery. In "Deadly Lively," the unsettling effect of Jerrold's

peculiar oxymoronic title is reinforced as he remarks the incongruous mixture of grief and festivity evident in the behaviour of the cemetery excursionists, and in the trading of "grave decorations, or pious emblems

suited to the purses of all." Indeed, the burial place is figured as a piece of

real estate, Jerrold reporting that "those graves at Montmartre which are

not bought 'in perpetuity' are let for fifteen years, at the expiration of

which tenancy the unconscious tenant is ousted from his resting place, and conveyed to a spot whither all fifteen-year tenants are removed in

similar circumstances" (140). As Hannay notes wryly of this new com

mercial enterprise for disposal of the dead, "Cemeteries express the feel

ings, and meet the wants of an altered time" (I05), and Household Words's

discussion of their development shows a mixed response to the commod

ity culture associated with them.

Another area of conflicted trade in death was the commodification of

the corpse itself. As Ruth Richardson has shown,

A small but important sector of the population -

anatomists, artists, physicians,

surgeons, articulators, dentists, and their suppliers -

depended in varying degrees

for their economic survival upon the ease with which the human corpse could be

treated as a commodity. (71-2)

As any reader of A Tale of Two Cities or Our Mutual Friend knows, commerce in bodies both fascinated and revolted Dickens. Household

Words also dealt with bodysnatching and dissection in an article by

Henry Morley published on 3 April 1858, entitled "Use and Abuse of the Dead." Taking as his premise the "imperative necessity that human anat

omy should be studied diligently by our surgeons and physicians," Mor

ley argues that it is not so difficult as it might at first appear to reconcile the "national feelings of humanity" and the "interests of science" in deal

ing with this contentious issue (361). His retrospect of the situation prior to the 1832 Anatomy Act outlines a range of abuses involved in meeting the necessity for dissection:

Churchyards were robbed, sick chambers were robbed; the high price that anato

mists were compelled to pay for means of study tempted wretched men to commit

murder. (361)

He describes the activity of the professional resurrectionist, who "chose




for himself a well-filled city graveyard, and then worked it, with a miner's

industry, in the most systematic manner." He details the techniques used to extract the body from the coffin, and the range of prices that a body so

stolen might fetch ("ten, twelve, and sometimes even fifteen pounds").

Throughout his account, Morley uses market terminology to describe the

traffic in corpses: bodies are "priced," bought and sold, discussed in terms

of supply and demand, packed in "sacks," "imported" and exported. Moreover, the success with which the Anatomy Act has removed many of the abuses associated with resurrectionism is measured, at least in part, in economic terms:

These regulations [he says] have entirely put an end to the older forms of body snatching, have made murder for dissection quite impossible, and have so far

tended to supply the anatomist with better means of study, that the price of a sub

ject to the student in this country is now four pounds, instead often. (363-4^

In her detailed analysis of the 1832 Anatomy Act, Ruth Richardson

argues that the Act was "in reality an advance clause to the New Poor

Law" in its establishment of a nationally organised and centrally funded

inspectorate, and in the way in which the threat of dissection was used to

augment the popular dread of the workhouse (191-2).10 The Act pro vided for the donation of corpses for dissection by any person in lawful

possession of a body, unless the deceased had expressed -

by writing or

verbally in the presence of at least two witnesses during the illness which

led to his or her death - a desire not to be dissected, or unless a surviving relative objected to the dissection." In effect, it provided for dissection of

those poor who died in the workhouse, thus signalling the criminalisation of poverty that was subsequently enshrined in the New Poor Law.11

According to Richardson, the Anatomy Act was a nearly success of

Benthamite/Malthusian policy, a "class reprisal against the poor": "only

incidentally," she argues, "did it endorse the respectability of scientific

medicine" (266). But Morley finds a justification for the Act in the union

of science and political economy.

Morley complains that while the Act has done much to remedy old

abuses and reduce the price of "subjects" for dissection, it has not "put an

end to the villainous jobbing in corpses which is still within the power of an undertaker who can get the master of a workhouse to assist his views"

(364). He attributes the problem to the clause of the Act which "makes it

simply permissive in those who have custody of an unclaimed body, to

give it for dissection." The remedy, he suggests, is not to adopt the French

system under which every person dying in a hospital automatically sur

renders his body to science, for this would be an infringement of personal

liberty. "In this country," he declares, "let no man alive or dead be denied



CATHERINE WATERS 3*5

bodily freedom." But as Richardson has shown, "bodily freedom"

depended upon having the economic means to obtain secure burial.

Morley's affirmation of personal freedom here highlights some of the

issues at stake in an anecdote he recounts. This concerns a certain "'Caro

line W."' who wrote to an anatomist "telling him that she was an unfortu nate woman weary of life, and eager to lay her burden down if she could

quit the world able to pay the few pounds that she owed to creditors"

(363). The woman wished to sell her body -

literally - and her story

makes explicit the economic basis of prostitution that, as Lynda Nead has

noted, was typically concealed within a language of social order, health, and morality in the "respectable, public discourses of Victorian Britain"

(99). Morley's account of the woman's plight raises questions about

agency and selfhood as it both reveals and resists the process of her com

modification. Significantly, no direct quotation of the woman's letter is

offered beyond her signature, Morley choosing instead to mediate her

voice through his third person narrative. The woman informed the anato

mist that "she was of such an age - so tall, so stout - of fair complexion;

and she might be seen on the Strand side of Temple Bar at a certain hour on a certain day." Using the street to display the body she proposes to

sell, the woman's self-objectification and reification are emphasised. The

threat to selfhood and the wretchedness of the woman's plight are cap tured in the peculiar disjunction of identity that emerges in her reported assurance to the anatomist: "If he would buy her for dissection she did not want any money for herself." Arguably, this tenuous subjectivity is

undermined even further by the denial of economic agency to the woman:

her offer of sale is, of course, refused. Morley apparently includes the anecdote in his article as an example of potential abuse of the dead occa

sioned by severe social distress. But no attempt is made to deal with the distress by giving the would-be seller the financial help she requires. The

response of the anatomist is to consult the police, who "appeared at the

appointed place of meeting, and scared the wretched soul away. No more was heard of her," writes Morley. The tragic irony of the woman's situa tion -

unacknowledged by Morley - is that her body can be of value only

when she no longer owns it. Living, the woman apparently could neither sell her labour (nor, presumably, her sexual services) for sufficient money to pay her debts nor contract for the sale of her own corpse to cover

them; dead, and unclaimed, she could become the property of the anato

mist under the provisions of the Anatomy Act.

Having exposed the continuity between the commodification of women's sexuality and body selling in this way, Morley calls for an

amendment to the Anatomy Act to include an "ordinance" rather than a

"permission" that "the unclaimed dead shall supply the needs of science

and humanity, whenever the body is not that of one who, in life, prohib




ited its use for such a purpose." His description of this ordinance finds a

justification for the commodification of the corpse in the mutually autho

rising discourses of science and economics:

Let there ... be a plain and fixed rule, that if any man die without having expressed

a wish to be dissected after death rather by worms than by his student brethren; rather to rot than be spiritualised into knowledge that shall dry hereafter many a

tear, ease many a pain; if any man die without having testified a desire that his

body should be useless rather than useful to society when he is gone, then let soci

ety have the benefit of the doubt. (364)

The idea of being "spiritualised into knowledge" is a long way removed

from the gruesome images of dissection depicted by Hogarth,12 or indeed

by Dickens, describing the young medical students, Bob Sawyer and Ben

jamin Allen, in the Pickwick Papers, gorging themselves at the Christmas

breakfast table at Dingley Dell while they discuss the dissection of arms

and legs: "'Nothing like dissecting, to give one an appetite,'" says Bob

(365-6)13. Morley's concern that bodies should be "useful" rather than

"useless" invokes a key Utilitarian principle and links it to the rhetoric of

scientific progress to form his argument supporting the regulation of

trade in corpses under the Anatomy Act. The problem for Morley is not

so much whether there should be a market in bodies, but how it should be

regulated to serve the ends of medical science. In its discussion of various forms of trading in death then, Household

Words represents a process of contested commodification that registers a

number of mid-Victorian anxieties about the appropriate scope of the

market. Morley, for example, endorses a narrative of economic and scien

tific progress in identifying the ways in which improvements in medical

practice have resulted from legislation facilitating and regulating commer

cial activity. In contrast, Dickens's critique of the rampant commercialism

of the funeral trade sets a narrative of capitalist entrepreneurship against a

narrative of non-commodifiable objects, of inalienable and incommensu

rable values. While demonstrating the technologies of display and

exchange that enable new things to be apprehended and treated as com

modities, he also suggests that some things cannot or should not be alien

ated in this way, that certain forms of commodification threaten

personhood. Of course, Dickens himself was not averse to trading in death through

the incorporation of emotionally-charged deathbed scenes in his fiction, or in some of his popular public readings

- such as Sikes's murder of

Nancy. His willingness to play on the reader's heartstrings is evident in a

number of the stories he wrote for Household Words,14 and his sentimen

tality drew criticism from reviewers. Trollope notoriously satirised him




as "Mr Popular Sentiment" in The Warden. "No man can offer to the

public so large a stock of death-beds adapted for either sex and for any

age from five-and-twenty downwards," wrote the Saturday Review in

1858.15 Notwithstanding the personal bias evident in James Fitzjames

Stephen's reviews of Dickens in the late 1850s, such criticism reminds us

that the journal's discussion of trading in death was part of its own

exchange value, its success as a commodity within the periodical market.

But this preoccupation was also a product of Dickens's peculiar imagina tive vision. As John Carey notes, Dickens was "just as intrigued by dead

bodies as Mrs Gamp" (80) and his fascination with corpses, coffins, wax

works, and second-hand clothing - with objects that inhabit the border

land between people and things, the living and the non-living suggests a

deep preoccupation with those ambiguously abstracted forms that char

acterise the commodity culture of industrial capitalism. Dickens's interest

in the disjunctive aspects of identity, in the power of objects to constitute or threaten selves, in the spectacle of commercial display, looks forward to the animism and fetishism attributed to commodities as "social things"

by Marx. Given the strong editorial control exercised by Dickens as the

journal's "Conductor," it also determines Household Words's pervasive concern to examine the part played by mid-Victorian commodity culture

in forming the subjects who inhabited it.

University of New England, Australia

NOTES

i Dickens would later describe undertakers as the "Medicine Men of Civilisa

tion" in The Uncommercial Traveller (1860-69).

2 See Pearsall for a discussion of anxieties about the postponement of the Duke's

burial.

3 Tony Bennett notes that the "peculiarity of the exhibitionary complex" is to

be found in its incorporation of aspects of panopticism with the principles of

the panorama, thus regulating the crowd by making it the ultimate spectacle

(68). 4 My discussion of shop windows owes much to Roof's chapter. It is ironic, given

Dickens's critique of the ambiguous function of shop windows, that one of the

spectators watching from the first-floor window of a stationer's in Fleet Street

was G. A. Sala, regular contributor to Household Words, who used his vantage

point to make sketches for a pocket-sized panorama of the state funeral, ren

dering the grand event in a miniature but nonetheless spectacular form. Drawn

and engraved in collaboration with the sporting artist Henry Alken, the pan

orama is a coloured aquatint on a continuous strip measuring 13 x 2042 cm.

Henry Alken and G. A. Sala, The Funeral of Arthur, Duke of Wellington




(Rudolph Ackerman Jnr., 1852). Sala also produced a

pocket-panorama of the

Great Exhibition: Great Exhibition 'Wot is to Be' (London, 1850). Copies of both panoramas are held by the Cambridge University Library.

5 The Interment Bill proposed to empower the Board of Health to provide for the management and conduct of funerals by persons appointed by them

- at

fixed charges: it proposed a limit to the commodification of death, legislating for something less than a laissez-faire market regime.

6 See for example [Henry Morley], "An Enemy's Charge." 7 Nevertheless, Household Words later published an article illustrating the very

epitaphic wit denounced by Hannay: Qames Payne], "Among the Tombs"

(3 April 1858): 372-5. 8 The title echoes in part Thomas Southwood Smith's influential article, "Use of

the Dead to the Living," which was originally published in the Westminster Review in 1824 in the years leading up to the first Anatomy Bill and reprinted in 1832 at the time of the second Bill. Smith was Bentham's physician and

anatomist, an active campaigner for reform in public health and sanitation, and

his 1854 pamphlet on recent Results of Sanitary Improvements was enthusias

tically reviewed by Morley for Household Words ("Your Very Good Health," Household Words [28 January 1854]: 524-26.) Morley himself had studied

medicine at Kings College. 9 Smith also urged the importance of economic considerations, arguing that "it

is of the utmost importance that [supply of subjects] should be abundant, reg ular, and cheap" (91).

10 Richardson notes that there was nothing in the Act "to ensure that the transfer

of bodies from 'executor' to anatomist should be gratuitous, and no embargo

upon the sale of corpses, entire or dismembered" (208).

11 Thomas Laqueur makes this point about the bodies of the poor generally

(122). 12 See, for example, "The Reward of Cruelty," plate IV of The Four Stages of

Cruelty (1751), reproduced in Stone (plate 18).

13 Although, as Sydney Carton's reflections upon the scaffold would suggest, the

idea that one's death might benefit the living is also part of Dicken's literary

imagination.

14 See, for example, "A Child's Dream of a Star."

15 Unsigned review of the Library Edition of the Works, Saturday Review, 8

May 1858. Reprinted in Collins (3834). Collins notes that the review is almost

certainly by James Fitzjames Stephen.

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CATHERINE WATERS 3 29

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"trading in death": contested commodities in "household words"

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