Gruesome London – graverobbing
Graverobbing is often thought to have been something that only happened in Edinburgh, where Burke and Hare carried out their depradations. (Not content with robbing graves, they also bumped off a few people who hadn’t died quickly enough.) But it was a problem in Victorian London, too.
Charles Dickens features a graverobber, the nastily named Jeremy Cruncher, in A Tale of Two Cities. We actually see him digging up the coffin – so does his young son, who admits to his father that he wants to be a bodysnatcher when he grows up. Obviously readers of Dickens’s novels wouldn’t have thought …read more
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