Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 1 Issue 1 | Page 15

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even at the Morgue?”24 The public’s need to access the dead even goes so far as to
hint at a cannibalistic need to consume. Dickens observes, “a pretty young mother,
pretending to bite the forefinger of her baby-boy”.25 We see the blood hungry crowd
wiping the excited saliva from their mouths in anticipation of the feast to come:
“Others of us who had no handkerchiefs administered a similar relief to our
overwrought minds, by means of prolonged smears or wipes of our mouths on our
sleeves”.26 Dickens notes this cannibalistic urge for the dead: “those next to the
gates beat at them impatiently, as if they were of the cannibal species and hungry”.27
To some extent he notices a part of this cannibalism within himself in the scene
where he imagines the corpse of the black man floating in the water with him: “In the
shock I had taken some water into my mouth, and it turned me sick, for I fancied that
the contamination of the creature was in it”.28
Dickens denies his reader a fresh corpse, despite the need to feed the hunger
for the dead. In the harrowing trial scene of the young mother suspected of murder
there are religious connotations. The scene where “[t]he miserable young creature
who had given birth to this child within a very few days, and who had cleaned the
cold wet door-steps immediately afterwards”, could represent the lowly birth of
Christ.29 The autopsy of the baby by the Coroner would then represent the mutilation
and damage done to religion by science and yet it is because of science that this
modern Mary is saved. Cannibalistic language is again used when Dickens writes “it
looked as if the cloth were ‘laid’ and the Giant were coming to dinner”.30 If viewed
from the baby’s perspective, the ‘Giants’ would then be Dickens and the Coroner.
Certainly the process of an autopsy could easily be compared to preparing a piece of
meat for the oven, but this time they will not consume. The growth of flesh that
prevented the child from breathing could be interpreted as the silencing of the word
of Christ. This Christ was born into a world that would not hear his message.
The matter at hand is whether to provide a new corpse through the execution
of the mother who could just as easily fall under the Coroners knife like her son as,
“[f]or a considerable time medical men, scientists and anatomists received their
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24

Ibid., 191.
Ibid., 190.
26
Ibid., 190
27
Ibid., 192.
28
Ibid., 65.
29
Ibid., 196.
30
Ibid., 196
25