Robert Louis Stevenson's The Body Snatcher: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis

Other than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, none of Stevenson’s horror tales has achieved greater renown than “The Body Snatcher.” The story appears regularly in anthologies of classic terror, standing shoulder to shoulder with “The Judge’s House,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Monkey’s Paw.” It deserves this distinction, for it resists simple classification. The supernatural episode that concludes the story cannot be conclusively labeled a haunting, a vision, a vampire’s return, or a reanimated corpse.

The ambiguity of the “resurrection” defies natural explanation while refusing to satisfy traditional ghost-story conventions, situating the tale squarely within the realm of speculative fiction—a liminal genre where the physical and metaphysical collide. Like Jekyll and Hyde, “The Body Snatcher” functions simultaneously as a horror narrative and a moral parable. Its surface plot—a grim account of medical students who acquire corpses through illicit means—conceals an intricate study of temptation, guilt, and spiritual decay.

Stevenson transforms what might have been mere gothic sensationalism into a meditation on moral blindness, the corruption of ambition, and the ethical limits of scientific progress. His practice of framing moral philosophy within the machinery of horror has ensured that his supernatural tales remain more than macabre curiosities; they are psychological allegories, moral fables that expose the frailty of human conscience under pressure.

II.

Among Stevenson’s short horror fiction, “The Body Snatcher” is arguably his most eloquent and philosophically sophisticated. It reads at times like a metaphysical treatise—sharing its blend of Gothic tragedy and moral philosophy with the likes of Crime and Punishment, Paradise Lost, and Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s influence is unmistakable.

Like Victor Frankenstein, Stevenson’s protagonist, Fettes, is an ethically apathetic medical student whose professional ambition eclipses his humanity. Both men seek to master the mysteries of life and death and end up trespassing upon divine prerogatives. Both spend more time among corpses than among the living, and both commit acts that transgress the laws of God and man alike. Most crucially, both succeed in bringing something back from death—something that forces them to confront the horror of their own desecration.

Stevenson’s reanimation is moral and psychological rather than literal, but the result is no less damning: a conscience resurrected against its will, a crime that refuses to stay buried. Fettes, moreover, has an unmistakably Faustian dimension. His willingness to suppress his moral instincts for the sake of advancement aligns him with Marlowe’s vulgar, power-hungry Doctor Faustus rather than Goethe’s loftier, self-tormented philosopher. Macfarlane, his partner and eventual tormentor, assumes the role of Mephistopheles—a figure of charm, irony, and pitiless self-interest.

Both tempter and tempted are driven by moral relativism, rationalizing their crimes under the banner of necessity and professional success. Stevenson exposes the danger of this utilitarian worldview, one that divorces intellect from empathy and science from morality. His message is stark: the desensitization of conscience is the first stage in damnation.

III.

The historical inspiration behind “The Body Snatcher” deepens its moral resonance. Stevenson was writing in the shadow of the notorious Burke and Hare murders of 1828, in which two men supplied the anatomist Dr. Robert Knox with bodies obtained not by disinterment but by murder. The public outrage that followed brought to light the uneasy relationship between scientific advancement and moral corruption.

Stevenson, himself the son of an engineer and a man fascinated by empirical inquiry, saw in the Burke and Hare case a grim parable of modernity’s peril: when human progress is pursued without ethical restraint, it transforms enlightenment into desecration. Critics such as Julia Reid and Barry Menikoff have noted how Stevenson’s story dramatizes the Victorian anxiety surrounding medical professionalism—the fear that doctors, in their quest for knowledge, might lose sight of their humanity.

Ultimately, “The Body Snatcher” is a cautionary tale about the futility of trying to escape guilt. Stevenson warns that the past, no matter how deeply concealed, will one day reassert itself. The three climactic moments in the story—three moments where Fettes is horrified by a startling confrontation with a person’s face—all stage the same moral revelation: we must look our crimes in the face.

For Fettes and Macfarlane, this confrontation is literal; for the reader, it is allegorical. In a world where moral transgressions can be rationalized as professional necessity or intellectual daring, Stevenson insists on the sacredness of the human body and the permanence of conscience. “Sooner or later,” the story teaches, “the body will be found—and with it, the soul.”

SUMMARY

Every night, four men regularly meet in the small parlour of the George Inn at Debenham: the landlord, an undertaker, the narrator, and an old Scotsman named Fettes. Once educated and comfortably off, Fettes is now a “crapulous, disreputable” drunkard. The townspeople call him “the Doctor” because he occasionally sets a bone or treats an injury, though little is known about his past.

One winter evening, news arrives that a wealthy local landowner has been struck with apoplexy and that his famous London physician has been telegraphed to come. When the landlord mentions the doctor’s name—“Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane”—Fettes, half drunk moments before, becomes instantly sober. He repeats the name “Macfarlane” in shock, then insists, “I must see him face to face.” The other men watch as the once-listless drunk becomes alert and deadly serious.

Soon, footsteps sound on the stair. The London doctor appears—a well-dressed, white-haired man of distinction. At the bottom of the stairs, Fettes confronts him directly: “Macfarlane!” When the doctor hesitates, Fettes repeats loudly, “Toddy Macfarlane!” The name startles the great physician, who whispers in terror, “Fettes! you!” After a stammered attempt at polite conversation, Macfarlane offers his old acquaintance money, but Fettes rejects him violently: “The money that I had from you is lying where I cast it in the rain.” Fettes accuses him of being proof that “there is no God,” and forbids him to pass. Macfarlane, humiliated before witnesses, slips out the door. Fettes seizes his arm and whispers one terrible question—“Have you seen it again?”—which makes the doctor cry out and flee into the night.

Shaken, the other men in the parlour question Fettes, but he warns them: “That man Macfarlane is not safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too late.” Without finishing his drink, he departs. The remaining companions, seized by curiosity, resolve to discover what connection links their drunken friend and the celebrated physician.

The narrator proceeds to recount the secret history of Fettes. In his youth, Fettes studied medicine at Edinburgh. He was intelligent, clever in repeating what he learned, and eager for success, though indolent and morally indifferent. He became a sub-assistant in the anatomy class of a popular extramural lecturer, identified only as “Mr. K——,” a thinly veiled reference to the infamous surgeon Knox. Fettes’s duties included maintaining the lecture theatre, supervising the students, and, most significantly, “to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects.”

At the time, anatomy students depended on “resurrection men”—body snatchers who exhumed corpses for dissection. Mr. K’s policy was simple: “They bring the body, and we pay the price. Quid pro quo. Ask no questions—for conscience’ sake.” Fettes obeyed, though he often noticed “the singular freshness of the bodies” and the sinister looks of the men who delivered them. He suspected that murder might be supplying the anatomy table, but comforted himself that his duty was “to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime.”

One winter morning, after a sleepless night, Fettes is roused by the familiar signal at the door. The body snatchers arrive late and anxious to be gone. When he lights the candle and looks at the corpse, he exclaims, “God Almighty! That is Jane Galbraith!”—a young woman he had spoken with the previous day. The men deny it, but one fixes him with a dark, threatening stare and demands payment. Terrified, Fettes pays them and, when they are gone, confirms by marks on her body that it truly is Jane, and that she bears signs of violence.

Panicked, Fettes resolves to consult his superior, the class assistant, a brilliant and reckless young doctor named Wolfe Macfarlane—known among students as a daring sportsman and man of the world. When Macfarlane arrives, Fettes shows him the body and pleads, “What should I do?” Macfarlane replies coolly, “Do you want to do anything? Least said, soonest mended.” When Fettes protests that others might recognize the girl, Macfarlane warns that if they speak up, both will be ruined: “Practically speaking, all our subjects have been murdered.” He advises Fettes to deny recognition, saying, “The next best thing for me is not to recognize it; and I don’t.” Intimidated, Fettes agrees. The body is dissected and no questions are raised.

Sometime later, Fettes meets Macfarlane at a tavern with a coarse, domineering man named Gray. Gray is small, dark, and vulgar, yet he wields an odd authority over Macfarlane, ordering him about and calling him “Toddy.”

When he commands, “Toddy, order your friend another glass,” Macfarlane obeys sullenly. Gray’s behavior grows ruder as he drinks, until Macfarlane’s resentment becomes palpable. Gray boasts of his own wickedness and sneers that Macfarlane “hates me,” adding, “He would like to do the lads’ play-knife all over my body.” Fettes jokes grimly, “We medicals have a better way than that. When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.” Macfarlane looks sharply at the remark but says nothing.

That night Gray grows drunk and forces Macfarlane to pay for an extravagant feast. The next day, Macfarlane is absent from class, and Fettes assumes he is still drinking with Gray. The following dawn, however, the familiar knock sounds. When Fettes opens the door, he finds Macfarlane with his gig—and in it, “one of those long and ghastly packages” wrapped for delivery. Fettes exclaims, “Have you been out alone? How did you manage?” but Macfarlane brusquely silences him and insists he look at the face. When Fettes finally unwraps the body, he recoils in horror: it is Gray, “the man whom he had left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern.”

Macfarlane coolly demands that Fettes pay him for the body, claiming that “the more things are wrong, the more we must act as if all were right.” He orders him to write the payment in the account book “and then you for your part may defy the devil.” Cowed, Fettes obeys, thus becoming complicit. Macfarlane justifies himself cynically: “You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning; that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.” He divides the world between “lions and lambs,” telling

Fettes, “If you’re a lamb, you’ll come to lie upon these tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a horse like me.”

Fettes, terrified yet fascinated, submits. Over the next days, the dissection of Gray proceeds in class without incident, and both men’s fears subside. Soon Fettes grows proud of his composure, boasting inwardly of his courage and his association with powerful men like Macfarlane and Mr. K——.

Weeks later, when the supply of bodies runs low again, K—— mentions a recent burial in a remote churchyard at Glencorse. Fettes and Macfarlane are sent to fetch the body—a farmer’s wife known for her piety. Late one stormy afternoon they set out in Macfarlane’s gig, hiding their tools near the churchyard and stopping at the Fisher’s Tryst for dinner. Over food and whisky, they toast their audacity. Macfarlane praises Fettes’s nerve for helping him with “that damned thing” earlier; Fettes laughs that he fears neither “Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, [nor] crime.” They finish their meal with a grim toast: “Here’s to the memory of Gray!”

That night, under pounding rain, they drive back to the graveyard, extinguish the lamps, and dig in darkness. Within twenty minutes they strike the coffin, break it open, and stuff the body into a sack. During the work, Macfarlane hurls a stone that accidentally shatters the lamp, plunging them into blackness. Undeterred, they finish, carry the sack to the gig, and start for Edinburgh.

As they rattle along the rutted road, the heavy, sodden bundle topples from side to side, brushing against them. The touch of the wet sack and the sense of its weight begin to unnerve them both. Farm dogs howl as they pass, and Fettes feels a rising horror: “It seemed somehow larger than at first.” At last he cries, “For God’s sake, let’s have a light!” Macfarlane stops, climbs down, and struggles in the rain to relight one of the lamps.

When the faint blue flame finally brightens, they see the outline of the body beneath the clinging sackcloth—its head and shoulders clearly molded. “That is not a woman,” whispers Macfarlane. Fettes answers, “It was a woman when we put her in.” Macfarlane insists, “Hold that lamp. I must see her face.” He unties the sack and draws it back. The light falls full on “the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too familiar countenance.” It is Gray—the man Macfarlane murdered and dissected weeks before.

Both men scream, leap from the gig, and flee into the road. The lamp falls and shatters; the terrified horse bolts toward Edinburgh, carrying with it “the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.”

ANALYSIS

“I must see him face to face…” Fettes’ desperate demand to confront his Mephistophelean tormentor recalls another eerie doubling: the ghostly pursuer in Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” In that story, a man is hounded by a persistent Doppelgänger who embodies his conscience—an incorruptible double whose presence exposes his moral decay. In his final clash with his conscience, the narrator corners his counterpart in a room and runs him through with a sword, only to realize that he is alone, standing in front of a mirror, watching blood flow from a self-inflicted wound.

Fettes endures a similar haunting, but one “made flesh” rather than a spirit or hallucination. He must repeatedly face the consequences of his own transgressions, staring them—literally and symbolically—in the face. First comes the visage of poor, smothered Jane, when he is forced to confront his complicity as an indirect accessory to her murder. Next, he encounters the corpse of the black-hearted Gray, at which point the unaware accessory to crime becomes a craven enabler to murder. Then, after symbolically selling his soul—first by paying for bodies, then by having accepted blood money, and finally by solemnizing a killing with a condoning toast—he meets Gray’s resurrected form, where the enabler becomes an outright accomplice.

At last – in his third confrontation – he faces Macfarlane himself, the ultimate clash between sinner and tempter. Decades later, seeing Macfarlane thrive respectably in society in large part due to his culpable indifference, Fettes recognizes how fully he has forfeited his soul.

By then he has become, in Stevenson’s moral cosmology, a sinner spiraling out of control due to the cardinal sins of secrecy, hypocrisy, and above all a lack of charity for the manner in which his misdeeds have caused evil to spread throughout the world – both in the microcosmic (the murders of marginalized people) and the macrocosmic (the elevation of Macfarlane to a place of power and influence) senses. When he finally perceives that his “little” sins have had eternal ramifications, this acknowledgement is the secret recipe needed to finally right his ship – perhaps in time to avoiding breaking up on the rocks of damnation.

II.

This recurring demand to “see” evokes not only the confrontation of conscience in Poe but also Victor Frankenstein’s obsession with facing his Creature after the murders. Like Frankenstein, Fettes is a kind of involuntary necromancer—a man who sought advancement and mastery over death but unwittingly reanimated moral horror instead. Both transgress ethical boundaries in pursuit of knowledge or ambition, and both are doomed to encounter their sins embodied before them. The “revived” corpse in “The Body Snatcher” thus becomes a tangible manifestation of moral consequence, a physical representation of the sin that cannot be buried.

Like Shelley’s Creature and Stevenson’s Gray, the dead return because sin demands recognition. Crimes against humanity—be they the desecration of a grave or the denial of conscience—cannot be quietly forgotten; they are, as Stevenson suggests, pregnant with retribution, destined to rise and stare their makers in the face. Gray’s grotesque resurrection—his weird theophany in the body of a dead widow—is not a conventional haunting. It belongs to no single species of the supernatural: it might be a ghost, a vampire, a zombie, or merely a hallucination born of hysteria.

The ambiguity itself is essential to Stevenson’s purpose. He uses the strange and unclassifiable precisely because his aim is not mere fright but revelation. A simple bloodsucker or rattling skeleton would not suffice. What he wishes to dramatize is the metaphysics of guilt—the unrelenting truth that sin, once committed, demands an accounting. Whether the second body truly transforms into the first is immaterial; the only thing that matters is that Fettes and Macfarlane are shown that no ingenuity, no clever argument, and no lapse of time can erase an unatoned crime. Stevenson’s horror is moral before it is supernatural.

The terror of “The Body Snatcher” lies not in what the dead might do to the living, but in what the living have already done to the dead. The corpse that “comes back” at the end may represent the inevitable return of conscience—the resurrection of moral awareness that Fettes and Macfarlane have tried to inter alongside the bodies they procured. In this sense, Stevenson’s tale anticipates both the psychological ghost stories of Henry James and the moral hauntings of modernist fiction, where the specter functions as a dramatization of guilt rather than an external threat.

Critics have noted that Stevenson’s supernatural events often operate as metaphors for the split self: the invisible struggle between public respectability and private corruption that defines his moral universe. Stylistically, Stevenson achieves his effect through restraint. The frame narrative—set in a comfortable tavern, with the respectable Fettes revealed as a haunted ruin—contrasts sharply with the grim memories of grave-robbing and dissection that surface through the dialogue.

This structural juxtaposition embodies one of Stevenson’s central preoccupations: the duality of the human soul. Fettes’s present and past selves exist uneasily side by side, as do Jekyll and Hyde, or Markheim and his mirror-image visitor. The horror arises from recognition—the moment when denial collapses and the sinner must confront the self he has buried. What returns from the grave in “The Body Snatcher” is not only a body, but the exhumed truth of identity. Stevenson transforms a sordid historical anecdote into a moral allegory of duplicity, repression, and the self’s inevitable reckoning with its own darkness.

III.

Still unrepentant in his old age, Fettes drifts through a purgatorial existence, haunting a coastal tavern like a soul awaiting judgment. His stubborn refusal to seek absolution ensures that Gray’s ghost—literal or metaphorical—continues to haunt him. Stevenson’s subtle suggestion that both he and Macfarlane suffer recurrent visitations implies that guilt itself has become their punishment.

When Fettes finally meets Macfarlane again, his insistence on looking him “in the face” becomes both an act of defiance and of desperate accountability. His metaphorical fall into the night after this encounter—Stevenson implies that he may have died that evening—signals his ultimate, final confrontation with his sins. Yet this call to account may not symbolize his damnation.

In demanding to see his tempter, Fettes performs, at last, a moral reckoning. Like a penitent who finally agrees to gaze upon and account for his own sin, he acknowledges what his apathy and silence have wrought: the unchecked survival and success of a shameless, homicidal sociopath among the highest ranks of respectable society. This scene mirrors the moral patterns of Stevenson’s broader supernatural fiction. In Jekyll and Hyde, “Markheim,” “Thrawn Janet,” and “The Bottle Imp,” redemption arrives only through confession, exposure, or self-sacrifice. Jekyll’s final confession purifies him through death; Markheim’s surrender to the gallows transforms his damnation into grace; Keawe’s sale of the infernal bottle saves his beloved though it condemns himself.

All three ultimately agree to face the consequences of their secret misdeeds and are purified through this submission to accountability. Sin must be named before it can be absolved, and hidden guilt festers into spiritual corruption. Fettes, unlike these figures, has delayed his confession for many years, but in seeking his confrontation—his final “vis-a-vis” with the tragic results of his evil actions—he may be moving at last toward truth. Whether he dies damned or delivered is left unresolved, but Stevenson allows for the possibility that even recognition of one’s corruption carries a faint redemptive light.

If there is a single moral thread running through Stevenson’s Gothic canon, it may be this: nothing hidden stays buried. The longer we conceal our sins, the more monstrous they become. Evil, when left unacknowledged, grows not weaker but stronger—bearing, as Stevenson’s tales so vividly show, hideous fruit.

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