In this essay, I will be contrasting the Resurrection Man from the ‘Mysteries of London’ with the real life bodysnatchers of Burke and Hare, two Irish men who carried out a series of murders over 10 months in Edinburgh in the 1820’s. Burke and Hare are probably the most famous of the real life bodysnatchers from the Victorian era. Like the Resurrection Man, the two used ‘burking’, the process of killing someone ’quietly or indirectly’ and in a manner so as to cause as little as possible visible damage to the bodies, so they could be provided to doctors for medical use.(Merriam Webster Dictionary) Burking was often done using suffocation as it left the least damage to the body and made it seem as if the person died of natural causes. Body snatching
