In the nineteenth century the corpse became central to medical education. In Britain, a growing number of private medical schools opened throughout the country, involving the rise of the demand for dead bodies. It is exactly around the same time that Gothic fiction was revamped and offered insights into the debates around medical practice and education. This chapter explores the links between the field of anatomy and the development of Gothic fiction in Britain in the nineteenth century. It points out how the Gothic dealt with medical practitioners’ treatment of the corpse and how Gothic narratives dramatised the tension between the stealing, cutting up, preservation, and exhibition of human remains in medical collections and the central part played by anatomical knowledge in medical science. By looking at texts by John Galt, Mary Shelley, and Samuel Warren, as well as Wilkie Collins and Robert Louis Stevenson, this chapter not only shows how literary texts capitalised on the Gothic paraphernalia to foreground the regulation (or lack thereof) of the practice of anatomy before the passing of the 1832 Anatomy Act, but also highlights how the Gothic enabled authors to record cultural responses to medical practice throughout the century.

By examining a constellation of writings originating in the years 1822 to 1824, this chapter brings together various forms of mobility and speculation. Galt’s Sir Andrew Wylie, of that Ilk depicts an enterprising protagonist’s move from rural Scotland to London and back again, once he has undergone a performative process of identity construction in a series of socio–economic fields. Published first in periodicals and then collected into volumes entitled Our Village, Mitford’s prose sketches about life in rural Berkshire document changes caused by speculation on property and new modes of transportation that increase both voluntary and involuntary mobility. Saint Ronan’s Well, Scott’s only novel set in the nineteenth century, presents the related but contrasting scenario of a Scottish village disrupted by the speculative development of a fashionable spa; it interweaves themes of gambling and identity theft with a critique of contemporary print culture and reading habits. Recurring motifs in these works show how authors and characters respond to changes in socio-economic relations as increased mobility affects their capacity to control literary, personal, and real property.

A concluding discussion of personal and textual identities, doubling, and fraud centres on a constellation of Scottish novels. Galt’s Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore (1820) is a pseudo–autobiography wrapped in a pseudo–translation that leads readers on into a multilayered, improvised hoax. Republished together with his novel Rothelan in 1824, Galt’s tale joins several novels about imitation and imposture published almost simultaneously in that year: Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Scott’s Redgauntlet, Susan Ferrier’s Inheritance, Sarah Green’s Scotch Novel Reading, and versions of Walladmor by Willibald Alexis and Thomas De Quincey. Together, these works show how not only personal identity but also historical events and books themselves can be fraudulently duplicated. From the psychologically fragmented identities and demonic doubling illustrated in Hogg’s Private Memoirs to the fraudulent pseudo–translation Walladmor, these novels interweave the practices of speculation and identity construction typical of late-Romantic print and performance culture.

This chapter examines the rhetoric, temporality, and interactivity of relationships between writers, readers, editors, and publishers of literary magazines and miscellanies, genres that were among the most important print media of the 1820s. Forms and styles of magazine writing became increasingly performative and improvisational as authors adapted to the demands of a periodical rhythm. Especially in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, this performative quality involves the construction of pseudonymous personae and theatricalized scenes that dramatize the process of producing the magazine and parody the notion of personal identity. Two lesser-known publications extend the impact and implications of this style of journalism: Knight’s Quarterly Magazine (1823–4), a Blackwood’s imitator edited by influential publisher Charles Knight, and John Galt’s The Bachelor’s Wife (1824), a miscellany that stages the processes of editing and reading within a gendered domestic setting.