It’s called The Bodysnatcher (would you believe it?), and what is fascinating is that it was drawn in 1913, more than 80 years after the end of bodysnatching.

The artist is Morris Meredith Williams, and the very generous David Patterson, Collections Manager at the Edinburgh City Art Centre, has allowed me to post it here (would that all archives were as generous with out- of-copyright material). Please, if any of you want to download it, do give credit where it’s due: City of Edinburgh Museums and Galleries.

What Meredith Williams has captured better than any other artist is the smirking furtiveness of Resurrection Men; and the sense of violation and the vulnerability of the recently departed human being – this scene has echoes of a sexual assault.

The act is taking place in a rather fancy-looking vaulted area, and top left, the stars are twinkling down on the goings-on. In the foreground is his “dark lanthorn”, which threw the rays downwards to avoid drawing attention.

The artist may well have read about the Italian Boy case as this villain has a look of John Bishop, murderer, about him, and those hideously powerful forearms match exactly the 1831 descriptions of Bishop.

However, he may also have come across this article in Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round (dated 16 March 1867), written by a reporter who recalled the day in 1828 that he happened to be in the corridors of parliament when the Select Committee on Anatomy was taking evidence; among the witnesses were a number of Resurrection Men. The reporter (and it is possible that it was a young Dickens himself) remembered:
“For several days in the summer of 1828, a certain committee room of the House of Commons, as well as all the passages leading to it, were thronged by some of the vilest beings that have perhaps ever visited such respectable places. Sallow, cadaverous, gaunt men, dressed in greasy moleskin or rusty black, and wearing wisps of dirty white handkerchiefs round their wizen necks. They had the air of wicked sextons, or thievish gravediggers. There was a suspicion of degraded clergymen about them, mingled with a dash of Whitechapel costermonger. Their ghoulish faces were rendered horrible by smirks of self-satisfied cunning, and their eyes squinted with sidelong suspicion, fear and distrust.”
To me, that is a verbal portrait of the creature Morris Meredith Williams depicted in 1913.