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69 Tex. L. Rev. 209 (1990-1991)
Personalizing Personalty: Toward a Property Right in Human Bodies

handle is hein.journals/tlr69 and id is 231 raw text is: Personalizing Personalty: Toward a Property Right in Human Bodies* Ishould not like-under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person. I. Introduction While the above words could easily be those of a California man seeking damages for the conversion of his spleen,' they are instead those of Silas Wegg, a character in Dickens's last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend. 2 Silas Wegg is a man with a wooden leg. His amputated leg is owned by Mr. Venus, who buys bones and assembles human skeletons. Silas Wegg's amputated leg, now part of the inventory of Venus, is only one example of Dickens's transformation of his characters from personal- ities to property. Dickens's focus on the nexus between individuals and property ex- tends throughout Our Mutual Friend. The novel opens with Gaffer Hexam, a riverman, making his living by fishing the Thames for corpses, which he strips of possessions and turns over to the police in exchange for the missing person rewards. The corpses are Gaffer's stock-in- trade, and the handbills kept on the wall of his home advertising the rewards for the corpses he has found are his inventory.'3 A counter- point to Gaffer's business of bodies is the story of Boffin the Golden Dustman and his Dust Mounds,4 reminding the reader that a fortune, one hundred thousand pounds to be precise, can be made from human refuse and excrement. Charles Dickens wrote long before the advent of modem biotechnol- ogy, yet was wonderfully prescient about some of the dilemmas society faces in delineating the extent of individuals' control over their persons. In Our Mutual Friend, Dickens clearly foresaw the problems that recog- nizing property interests in human beings creates. Silas Wegg, a victim * The author wishes to thank her husband and family for their continuing support and encouragement. 1. See Moore v. Regents of Univ. of Cal., 215 Cal. App. 3d 709, 249 Cal. Rptr. 494 (1988), aff'd in part, rev'd in part, 51 Cal. 3d 120, 793 P.2d 479, 271 Cal. Rptr. 146 (1990). 2. C. DICKENS, OUR MUTUAL FRIEND 127 (Penguin 15th ed. 1984). 3. See id. at 64-65. 4. In Victorian London, domestic refuse was collected and dumped into private dust-yards. The mounds were sifted, sorted into constituents, and sold. H. MAYHEW, LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR 158-81 (London 1861). 209

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