Rat-Catcher

In Georgian and Victorian Britain, when rats infested homes, granaries, sewers, and ships in numbers no one could ignore, the answer was a freelance specialist with a sack, a few terriers, and a pocketful of ferrets. The rat-catcher was hired by households, farms, warehouses, and parishes to clear out vermin, and he did it with a hands-on repertoire that mixed cunning, showmanship, and real physical courage. He set traps, sent ferrets into burrows, loosed dogs, and, notoriously, caught rats alive with his bare hands, building a trade out of an animal everyone else loathed.

The emblematic figure is Jack Black, who styled himself “rat and mole destroyer to Her Majesty,” cut a flamboyant figure in a homemade uniform with a sash of cast-iron rats, and was interviewed by the journalist Henry Mayhew for his great survey of the metropolitan poor, “London Labour and the London Poor.” Black caught rats for government departments and the royal parks, sold live rats to the pits where dogs were timed killing them for sport and gambling, and, in a curious sideline, bred unusually coloured rats and sold them as pets to ladies, helping to start the fancy-rat hobby almost by accident.

The work was dangerous and dirty. Rat-catchers were bitten constantly, risked serious infection including what is now called Weil’s disease, and handled home-brewed poisons, often arsenic-based, that could sicken or kill the catcher as readily as the rat. Each practitioner guarded his own secret lures and mixtures, and the trade had more in common with a folk craft passed between individuals than with any organized profession.

The rat-catcher was not so much exterminated as absorbed. Germ theory and the great Victorian public-health reforms reframed rats as a disease vector and made their control a matter of municipal sanitation, sewers, and law rather than freelance heroics. Regulated commercial rodenticides, and from 1950 the safer anticoagulant warfarin, replaced secret arsenic recipes; licensing and the rise of a professional pest-control industry did the rest. The colourful freelancer with his ferrets and terriers gave way to the uniformed technician with a clipboard, and the trade survives, transformed, as modern pest control.

Resurrectionist

In late-Georgian Britain, the anatomy schools that trained the nation’s surgeons had a problem they could not legally solve: they needed dead bodies, and the law allowed them almost none. The only fully lawful source of cadavers for dissection was the corpses of executed murderers, handed over under the Murder Act of 1752 as an added punishment. But executions were comparatively few while medical schools, especially in London and Edinburgh, were expanding fast and needed hundreds of bodies a year for teaching.

Into that gap stepped the resurrectionists — also called “resurrection men” or body snatchers. Working at night in small gangs, they dug up the freshly buried dead and sold them to anatomists. A legal quirk made the trade attractive: a corpse was held to be no one’s property, so stealing a body itself was not a felony but at most a misdemeanour. The shrouds, coffins, and grave goods were property and could not be touched; the naked body could. Gangs learned to lift a corpse cleanly and leave the grave clothes behind precisely to stay on the lighter side of the law.

The public response was fear and fury. Bereaved families and churchyards defended their dead with mortsafes (heavy iron cages over graves), watch-towers, hired guards, iron coffins, and burial clubs that paid for vigilance through the dangerous first weeks of decay. The trade poisoned the ordinary grief of burial with the knowledge that a fresh grave was a target.

Then the trade tipped into murder. In Edinburgh in 1828, William Burke and William Hare bypassed the graveyard entirely and simply killed people to sell, suffocating around sixteen victims for the anatomist Robert Knox. In London in 1831, the “London Burkers” — Bishop, Williams, and Head — murdered to order in the “Italian Boy” case. The horror these crimes produced was the political force that ended the trade by law.