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Abstract
The Body Snatcher was finally published in 1884, and then only because another of his stories--Markheim, a commissioned Christmas ghost story for the Pall Mall Gazette--proved too brief and Stevenson could write no more, his chronic ill-health worsening at the time. The historical figures Burke and Hare, or men very like them, appear as nocturnal bit-players in Stevenson's story, "unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table", delivering the body of a young woman for dissection. Stevenson's acute analysis of degrees of guilt; the complicit socialisation of maleness; the hypocrisies which so often lie behind worldly success; the damage behind apparent failure; the dark silences that can exist in social relations that pass as bonhomie.