The Monster Man

G. W. M. Reynolds must have had a huge morgue of newspaper clippings for use in his notorious fictions. In Mysteries of the Court of London his character of the monster-man was based on a real-life French case of July 1849, in which a man named Bertrand was involved in horrible crimes involving desecrating the dead in a cemetery. Below is Reynold’ fictional account of The Monster Man in Mysteries of the Court of London, followed by the true account of as recounted in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 25 August 1849.