The Resurrectionist:

The remains of more than twenty dead bodies were discovered in a shed in Tottenham-Court Road, supposed to have been deposited there by traders to the surgeons; of whom there is one, it is said, in the Borough, who makes an open profession of dealing in dead bodies, and is well known by the name of the resurrectionist.

March 1776

Pop goes...

... the weasel.

Not a mammal from the mustelidae family, but a tailor's flat-iron, common in Turpin's time. You knew it was hot enough when your spittle sizzled.

Morecambe & Wise do Dick Turpin

Let's hear it for Richard O'Sullivan

Dick Turpin and the Restless Dead:

"When notorious highwayman Dick Turpin stumbles across a deserted village following his latest highway robbery it seems the ideal place to hide out. But the village is not as empty as it first appears - and Turpin soon finds himself surrounded by hordes of rotting, hungry zombies!"

© Steve Tanner & Andrew Dodd

Available from SMALLZONE online comic shop

How to get Ahead...

... steal one: a practice known as cranioklepty.

One of my favourite blogs, Morbid Anatomy (http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/) relates that:

"With the rise of phrenology, the early 19th century saw a host of bizarre grave robberies, in which the graves of famous men were plundered for their owners’ skulls. Both scientific curiosities and morbid fetishes, the skulls became subject to extended legal battles between religious and secular authorities over who owns these remains, while phrenologists continued to study them for visible proof of genius. "

Among the famous heads to have enjoyed a longer stay on earth than their shoulders, we find Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Swedenborg, Goya, Cromwell, Petrarch, Ned Kelly and Sir Thomas Browne, who had famously written what a “tragical abomination” it is to be “gnawed out of one’s grave,” a century and a half before his own cranium was half-inched in 1840.

It has not been publicly noted before, but to this list we can now perhaps add Dick Turpin.

York City Archives include, in a 19thC vicar's diary, the intriguing entry:

"A London paper published in June 1861 relates the following statement -

The skull of Dick Turpin under a glass shade many years in possession of the 'Morley family of York' that was one of the lots put up to auction at the sale of 'genuine furniture' last Friday in Church Street Soho, the piece of bone sold for 4s - glass shade and all."

This could have been quite true, an accidental fraud or a deliberate hoax. And we may never know which.

Still, needless to say, I will be investigating this further and will keep you posted as to my findings.

Rising up in panic:

... not that Fragonard:


... dear old Jean-Honoré, creator of cutesy-twee prettiness that really does disturb my stomach. No - this is plain Honoré, his cousin, and made of much darker stuff.

And what was Palmes planning?

A little light anatomizing - this sort of thing:


The body of such an infamous criminal as Turpin must have been an object of some medical curiosity, and the seat of his courage and persistent recidivism sought in the gory mystery of his internal organs.

But whatever Mr. Palmes had in mind, it's unlikely that he would have done anything as ambitious as Honoré Fragonard.

Fragonard spent nine years in the 1760s preparing his écorchés: elaborate anatomical teaching models, made by flaying and injecting wax, dyes and stiffening agents into prepared dehydrated human and animal corpses.

The unsettling (and to me, rather beautiful) results, which can be seen in the Museé Fragonard, Maisons-Alfort, fall somewhere between sculpture and dissection. If he had taken his knife to Turpin and produced something like his Cavalier (horseman) below, I might almost have approved:

It's not the cough that carries you off...

It's Marmaduke Palmes of the city of York, surgeon; assisted by a labourer named Richard Hogg.

From the York City Archives:

"After the execution the corpse of Turpin was brought to the Blue Boar, in Castlegate, where it remained till the next morning & then interred in the church-yard of St. George - the grave was made remarkably deep & the people who acted as mourners took such measures as they thought would secure the body, yet about three o'clock in the following morning some persons were observed in the church-yard, who carried it off."

Routously:

in a routous or disorderly manner.

As: 'he did riotously, unlawfully, routously and tumultously assembled with intent to break open the said gaol.'

(From documents relating to the 1792 Great Yarmouth riots).

Dutch Dick

bang bang - you're dead

a shooter, similar in principle but quite different in design to anything Dick would have shot.



much more the sort of thing a young Turpin would have hidden in his waistcoat