All the Living and the Dead

by Hayley Campbell

By the time Mary Shelley was born in 1797, bodysnatching was rife, and it was no secret, either; when she was a young adult, various contraptions, like iron cages to hold coffins, were being sold specifically to thwart the resurrectionists. Bodies were stolen from the churchyard where her mother Mary Wollstonecraft was buried, where the story goes that her father had taught her to write her name by tracing over the carved letters on her mother’s headstone. Ultimately, it fed into her work: none of the bodies that became the monster in Frankenstein had signed a contract to be there – he is nameless, a product, a belonging – while the real monster was the scientist, who was so gripped by the idea of his own creation that he disregarded what was right.