Devonshire Characters and Strange Events
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A second said: “The course I should take would be to have the workhouse subjects; we can get them out of the burial-ground without any difficulty whatever.”
One of the largest dealers was Israel Cohen, commonly called Izzy, a Jew, well known to surgeons and sextons. By the surgeons he was patronized; of the sextons he was the patron; and so complete was the understanding between the profession to which he belonged and those with which he was connected, that the interest of all three was advanced by coalition. He was a square-built, resolute ruffian, with features indicative of his Hebrew origin, black whiskers, and a squint.
The Plymouth medical men memorialized the Government in 1827 relating to the necessity they were in of having human bodies for dissection, and the inadequacy of the legitimate supply. “In other countries,” they said, “the dissection of the dead, so necessary to the well-being of the living, is permitted and protected; and is actually prosecuted, without shocking any existing prejudice or violating the sanctities of the dead. It follows either that the professional gentlemen of this kingdom must be contented with a very inferior medical education, or that they must resort to the Continent to obtain that information which is denied to them by the laws of Great Britain.” The alternative of having recourse to resurrectionists they did not refer to. The memorial produced no results.
In the recent alterations of Princetown Church, it was found that no inconsiderable number of the graves of the French prisoners who died during incarceration were empty. There can be little doubt that the bodies were disposed of to the surgeons in Plymouth. It was generally supposed that the body-snatchers in exhuming a corpse first proceeded, as would a novice, in excavating the whole grave, and having arrived at the coffin would then force off the lid and so get possession of the body. But this would have been too slow an operation. To do the job expeditiously they cleared away the earth above the head of the coffin only, taking care to leave that which covered the rest of the coffin undisturbed. As soon as about one-third of the chest was thus exposed, they forced a very strong crowbar between the end of the coffin and the lid, and easily prised it open. It usually happened at this stage of the proceedings that the superincumbent weight of earth on the other portion of the coffin-lid caused it to be snapped across. As soon as this was effected the body was drawn out, the death-gear removed from it and replaced in the coffin, and finally the body was tied up in a bundle or thrust into a sack and taken away, the whole operation lasting not over a quarter of an hour.
Very generally a hackney coach or a spring cart was in waiting to receive the body. When corpses were sent from the country to London they were generally packed in barrels or hat-crates. But when one was to be taken to a dissecting-room in the same town it was laid on a large piece of green baize, the four corners were tied together, and so the body was rolled up in a bundle. The body-snatcher would then, dressed as a porter, swing the load over his shoulder, and often, even in broad daylight, carry it to its place of destination through the most crowded streets.
Every means which ingenuity could suggest was put in practice to obtain bodies which had not been buried. For this purpose the men, when they heard of the body of a person being found – drowned, for instance, and lying to be owned – trumped up a story of an unfortunate brother or sister, humbugged a coroner’s jury, and thus obtained possession of the body. In this sort of trickery the wives of the men were often employed, as their application was attended to with less suspicion, and it was never difficult to impose on the parochial officials, who were always anxious to avoid the expense of burying the deceased. Subjects were thus occasionally procured, but they were more frequently obtained by pretending relationship to persons dying without friends in hospitals and workhouses. As the bodies thus obtained were much fresher than those which had been buried, they produced generally, independent of the teeth, as much as twelve guineas each.
At the commencement of a new term at the hospitals, the lecturers on anatomy were beset by the leading dealers in subjects, and “fifty pounds down, and nine guineas a body,” was often acceded to. The larger sum down secured to the lecturer the exclusive supply of that dealer’s wares. The competition for subjects was great, and in some cases twenty pounds were paid for a single corpse in good condition.
Stoke Church and yard lay solitary amid waste land. It had a wall round it, but no houses very near, and there were no oil lamps burning in the road that passed it.
A strong suspicion was entertained that the graves there had been rifled, and were so continually, and it was proposed to the parish authorities to have lamps and organize a night watch. But the officials shrank from the expense, and many people reasoned that it were well to allow the resurrectionists to get bodies from graves, as bodies the surgeons must have, rather than run the risk of inducing these scoundrels to imitate the proceedings of Burke by killing individuals for the purpose. Within a stone’s throw of Mill Bridge was a commodious residence called Mount Pleasant, with Stonehouse Lake or Creek on one side, and Stoke Church on the other. A man, apparently well to do, a Mr. Gosling, took the house, and brought in a somewhat mixed party of men and women. The neighbours thought the family was peculiar, but as he was a pleasant-spoken man and the ladies of the party were affable and sympathetic, and as he paid his way with punctuality, they were content. Indeed, they were more than content. The females of the Gosling household attended every funeral, and expressed their tenderest feelings of regard and pity for the mourners, asked all particulars about the deceased, his or her age, and what malady had hurried the lamented one to his grave, as also occasionally whether the deceased had good teeth. At night, immediately after every funeral, the men of the party stole forth, furnished with crowbar and spades, and equipped with a sack or two, and made their way into the graveyard, where they worked by the light of a dark lantern. The sexton had been squared, and he had not made the grave very deep, nor had he heaped the earth thickly over it.
But the gang did not confine operations to the last interment. They opened other graves, and if the corpses were too much decomposed to be of any commercial value they contented themselves with drawing all their teeth.
Sometimes it happened that the subjects when removed to Mount Pleasant underwent rapid decomposition. Then they were buried in the garden, and restored to the graveyard on the next visit.
Neighbours now began to notice that lights were burning in Mount Pleasant at all times of the night. It was also remarked that the grave mounds bore a suspicious look of having been tampered with – not those recently made only, but others more ancient.
In the nearest house was a shrewd, observant servant-girl, and the lights, the way they moved about at night in the rooms of the villa – not in the bedrooms, but downstairs, at times when every one else was asleep – aroused her suspicions. Her bedroom window commanded the villa of Gosling and Co., and wake at what time she might or however early in the morning before daybreak, there the lights were. She resolved on keeping watch; and she stationed herself where, unseen, she could observe proceedings. Towards midnight she saw dark figures emerge from Mount Pleasant and make their way to Stoke Church. Follow she did not. Her courage was not equal to that; but she waited and watched till the figures stole back, and on this occasion she distinctly saw sacks being carried on the backs of two of the men. She now remembered that she had often noticed packing-cases and casks being taken from the villa to the water’s edge and placed on a barge apparently waiting there for its load. In the morning the girl told her master what she had seen, and he at once apprised the police.
These latter now placed themselves behind the wall at night to watch what would happen; they were rewarded one night after there had been a couple of funerals in the churchyard. The constables saw the men dig and shovel for about ten minutes; heard them strike a coffin-lid, and proceed to force it up. Then by the faint light they saw them remove a corpse and put it into a sack. Thereupon one of the men came out of the yard as a scout to see that the coast was clear. After that they hoisted the body over the churchyard wall and made towards Mount Pleasant. As the constables on this occasion were but two and there was a considerable gang in the villa, they returned to Devonport, where they collected a sufficient force of watchmen and special constables, and surrounded the building, where the resurrectionists were enjoying a refreshing sleep after their labours. Scaling the wall by means of a ladder and advancing in their stocking-soles, they entered the various bedrooms, and secured four men and two women, pinioned and gagged them. They were taken completely by surprise.
In the kitchen were found two sacks. In one was the body of a girl of eighteen, in the other that of an elderly man. The cupboards and drawers were stocked with extracted teeth and implements of dentistry for drawing them.
When on the following morning it was noised in Devonport that a confederacy of body-snatchers had been captured, the greatest excitement prevailed. The relatives of all who had died and been buried within a couple of years and more crowded the cemetery demanding that the graves of their kinsfolk should be examined. The graveyard turned out to have been a mine well worked. Grave after grave was opened, and dishevelled shrouds and mutilated bodies, teethless jaws, revealed to the distracted relatives of the dead that the graves had been violated.
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.
Gay was bound apprentice to a London mercer, but, his health failing, he returned to Barnstaple, where he dwelt with his uncle, the Dissenting minister, John Hanmer. The association must have been most unsuitable to both. John “toujours gai” with a poet’s fancy, a buoyant heart, what more incongruous than to be lodged under the roof and nourished at the table of a sour and moody Puritan!How and when he broke away from this depressing and distressing environment we do not know. All that is known of this early period is to be found in a little work called Gay’s Chair, written by his nephew, Joseph Ballard. At the age of twenty-one he wrote his first piece, Rural Sports, which he dedicated to Pope, with whom he became afterwards allied in intimate friendship. In 1712 we find him secretary, or rather domestic steward, to the Duchess of Monmouth, in which station he continued till the beginning of the year 1714, at which time he accompanied the Earl of Clarendon to Hanover, whither that nobleman was dispatched by Queen Anne. In the latter part of the same year, in consequence of the Queen’s death, he returned to England, where he lived in the highest estimation and intimacy of friendship with many persons of rank; he became, in fact, the petted lap-dog of fashionable society.Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales, was interested in him, and sent to invite him to read his play, The Captives, before her at Leicester House. The day was fixed, and Gay was commanded to attend. He waited some time in a presence chamber, with his manuscript in his hand, but being a modest man, and unequal to the trial into which he was entering, when the door of the drawing-room was thrown open, where the Princess sat with her ladies, he was so much confused and concerned about making the proper obeisance that he did not see a low footstool that happened to be in the way; and, stumbling over it, fell against a large screen, which he upset, and threw the ladies into no small disorder.
Gay was bound apprentice to a London mercer, but, his health failing, he returned to Barnstaple, where he dwelt with his uncle, the Dissenting minister, John Hanmer. The association must have been most unsuitable to both. John “toujours gai” with a poet’s fancy, a buoyant heart, what more incongruous than to be lodged under the roof and nourished at the table of a sour and moody Puritan!
How and when he broke away from this depressing and distressing environment we do not know. All that is known of this early period is to be found in a little work called Gay’s Chair, written by his nephew, Joseph Ballard. At the age of twenty-one he wrote his first piece, Rural Sports, which he dedicated to Pope, with whom he became afterwards allied in intimate friendship. In 1712 we find him secretary, or rather domestic steward, to the Duchess of Monmouth, in which station he continued till the beginning of the year 1714, at which time he accompanied the Earl of Clarendon to Hanover, whither that nobleman was dispatched by Queen Anne. In the latter part of the same year, in consequence of the Queen’s death, he returned to England, where he lived in the highest estimation and intimacy of friendship with many persons of rank; he became, in fact, the petted lap-dog of fashionable society.
Queen Caroline, then Princess of Wales, was interested in him, and sent to invite him to read his play, The Captives, before her at Leicester House. The day was fixed, and Gay was commanded to attend. He waited some time in a presence chamber, with his manuscript in his hand, but being a modest man, and unequal to the trial into which he was entering, when the door of the drawing-room was thrown open, where the Princess sat with her ladies, he was so much confused and concerned about making the proper obeisance that he did not see a low footstool that happened to be in the way; and, stumbling over it, fell against a large screen, which he upset, and threw the ladies into no small disorder.
In 1726 he dedicated his Fables, by permission, to the Duke of Cumberland. From his countenance, and promises made of preferment, he hoped to have obtained some office in which, without being overworked, he might be well paid, and able to devote himself more at leisure to the Muses. Instead of which, in 1727, he was offered the place of gentleman-usher to one of the youngest princesses; an offer which, as he regarded, it was insulting to make. In a fit of resentment, and in ill-humour with the Court, he wrote The Beggars’ Opera as a satire on the Italian opera, then warmly patronized by the Court.
Swift had observed to Gay what an old, pretty sort of thing a Newgate pastoral would make. Gay was inclined to consider the suggestion, but afterwards, hot in his resentment against the Court, turned the theme into a comedy. He began The Beggars’ Opera, and mentioned it to Swift, but the Doctor did not much like the project. As he carried it on, he showed what he had written to him and to Pope, and they now and then gave him a correction or a word or two of advice; but it was wholly of his own writing. When it was done, neither of them thought it would succeed. The play was offered in 1727 to Cibber at Drury Lane, and was by him rejected with contempt. Congreve read it over and said, “It will either take greatly or be damned confoundedly.”
The play was, however, accepted by Rich, and produced at Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. When brought on the stage on the first night, 29 January, 1727–8, Gay’s friends sat in great uncertainty of the event, till they were vastly encouraged by overhearing the Duke of Argyll, who sat in the next box, say: “It will do – it must do! I see it in the eyes of them!” When Polly Peachum sang her pathetic appeal to her parents —
O ponder well, be not severeTo save a wretched wife,For on the rope that hangs my dearDepends poor Polly’s life,and this, to the air of “The Babes in the Wood,” familiar to the entire audience from their nurseries, the effect was magical. The audience broke into a roar of applause, and the success of the play was established.
The plot of the piece was thin and poor, but the people were refreshed, and rejoiced to hear again the old familiar notes of English music. There were sixty-nine airs in The Beggars’ Opera, and nearly every one was an old English ballad or song air. Gay was not himself a musician, but he had his head full of old ballads and their airs, most, doubtless, picked up about Barnstaple or Bideford, and he set to the tunes words suitable to his characters and the dialogue, and then got a German named Pepusch to note them down for him and write a simple orchestral accompaniment and an overture. The author, according to Mace, got the entire receipts of four nights, amounting in the aggregate to £693 13s. 6d., whereas Rich, the manager, after the piece had been performed thirty-six times, had pocketed nearly £4000. It was well said that this play made Rich gay, and Gay rich.
Lavinia Fenton had been tempted by Rich from the Haymarket to Lincoln’s Inn Fields to act the part of Polly in The Beggars’ Opera at a salary of 15s. per week, but owing to the enormous success of the play he raised it to 30s.; and such was the rage of the town respecting her that she was obliged to be guarded home every night by a considerable party of her confidential friends, to prevent her being hurt by the crowd or being run away with. The Duke of Bolton became enamoured of her – took her under his protection, as the euphemism went. The Duke was then in the prime of life, living apart from his wife. “Polly” was not remarkably pretty, but she had a charming manner and a delicious voice. Wharton tells us that he knew her, and could testify to her wit, intelligence, and good manners. “Her conversation,” says he, “was admired by the first characters of the age, particularly the old Lord Bathurst and Lord Grenville.” She and the Duke had several quarrels, and after one very serious explosion he gave her notice to quit the house.
She retired to her room, assumed the costume of Polly Peachum, returned, and presenting herself before him in all the grace and charm with which she had first won him, with tears in her eyes, sang —
Oh, what pain it is to part!Can I leave thee? Can I leave thee?Oh, what pain it is to part!Can thy Polly ever leave thee?to the air “Gin thou wert mine ain thing,” to which it had been set by Gay.
Touched by the remembrance of the past and by her witchery of manner, the Duke opened his arms, she flew to his heart, and the reconciliation was complete. On the death of the Duchess, the Duke married Lavinia Fenton at Aix in Provence, 21 October, 1751, just one day beyond the month after the death of his wife, who died on 20 September.
The children borne by “Polly” to the Duke before the marriage were three sons, who all assumed the name of Powlett. The Duke died on 26 August, 1754, and was succeeded in the dukedom by his brother. “Polly” Fenton died at West Combe Park, Kent, on 24 January, 1760, at the age of fifty-two.
Assuredly never was a more sudden, complete, and unexpected success achieved than that by the production of The Beggars’ Opera. It defied the prevailing taste; it went contrary to all the received canons of art, it was as audacious as a play as it was musically. Hitherto the Opera had been in the hands of Italians. The themes selected for musical setting had been classic and mythological. Then came Gay, taking his subject from the lowest class – gaol-birds; and discarding all intricate and foreign music, set his songs to melodies familiar to all from their cradles.
It was said of the deserted stalls and boxes at the Italian Opera whilst Gay’s piece held the town, that he had made of the Italian the veritable Beggars’ Opera.
Sir Robert Walpole was frequently the subject of Gay’s satire. Nevertheless he attended the first performance, and sat in one of the stage lounges. When Lockit sang —
When you censure the age,Be cautious and sage,Lest the courtiers offended should be.If you mention vice or bribe,’Tis so pat to all the tribe,That each cries – That was levelled at me!Sir Robert observing that all eyes turned upon him at these lines, parried the thrust by leading the applause. After an uninterrupted run in London of sixty-three nights, and emptying the Italian Opera House, the play spread into all the great towns of England, and was played in many places thirty or forty times – in Bath and Bristol fifty times. It made its progress into Wales, where it contributed some of its airs to national Welsh melody, to Scotland and Ireland; and last of all it was performed in Minorca.
Nor was its fame confined to the reading and representation alone, for the card-table and the drawing-room shared with the theatre and the closet in this respect; the ladies carried about the favourite songs engraven on their fans, and screens were decorated with scenes from the play.
Hogarth’s painting representing the first scene on the boards, with noble dukes and earls on fauteuils upon the stage, is well known. His portrait of Polly Fenton is in the National Gallery.
The Beggars’ Opera was revived by Messrs. Gatti at Covent Garden in the season 1878–9. On this occasion wrote Punch: “The house was literally crammed from floor to ceiling by an audience whose enthusiastic temperature increased in a graduated thermometrical scale, the over-boiling point being reached at the back row of the upper gallery; and this on a night when, in the stalls and boxes, wrappers, furs, mantles, and ulsters were de rigueur on account of the rigour of the cold… Let those who do not believe in a comic tenor see Sims Reeves as Captain Macheath, and they will discover what magic there is even in a refrain of ‘tol-de-lol, lol-de-rol, loddy,’ when given by a tenor who is not impressed by the absurd traditional notion that he is nothing if not sentimental. His acting of the celebrated song ‘How happy could I be with either’ is full of humour, and his change of manner from ‘tol-de-rol’ in a tender tone, when addressed to the gentle, confiding Polly, to the ‘tol-de-rol’ with a true Cockney chick-a-leary twang when addressed to the vulgar Lucy Lockit, is a clever idea, most artistically carried out; and then his dance up the stage while singing, giving his last note good and true to the end in spite of his unaccustomed exertion, as with a jump he seats himself in a natural devil-may-care style upon the table, was followed by an encore so momentous that even he, the anti-encorist, was fain to comply with the enthusiastic demand; so he repeated the two verses, the dance, and the jump with as much freshness and vigour as though he had not already sung six songs – snatches, more or less, it is true – and had got ten more to follow.”