R. V. Dudley and Stephens - Cultural Impact

Cultural Impact

The case is familiar among lawyers in the common law jurisdictions—that is, England and many, though not all, former British territories—and is universally studied by law students in such jurisdictions. Simpson observed that, though many murderers have become household names in Britain, the case is surprisingly unfamiliar to the public at large.

It became better known in 1974 when Arthur Koestler ran a competition in The Sunday Times, in which readers were invited to send in the most striking coincidence they knew of. The winning entry pointed out that in Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, published in 1838, decades before the Mignonette sank, four men are cast adrift on their capsized ship and draw lots to decide which of them should be sacrificed as food for the other three. The loser was the sailor who had proposed the idea: the character's name was Richard Parker.

Richard Parker is the name of several people in real life and fiction who became shipwrecked, with some of them subsequently being cannibalised by their fellow seamen. Writer Yann Martel in his 2001 novel Life of Pi picked up on these occurrences, surmising "So many Richard Parkers had to mean something", and included a shipwrecked Bengal tiger called "Richard Parker" in the book.

The case was also the basis for an infamous Monty Python sketch, titled "Lifeboat (Cannibalism)/Still no Sign of Land". In that sketch, five sailors are on a lifeboat after a shipwreck, and the only way they can survive is through cannibalism. Once they decide whom to eat—and which body parts—a waitress is called over to take their orders, complete with vegetables. In Monty Python's Flying Circus, this is followed by the controversial "Undertakers sketch", which also features cannibalism.

In 2004, the Avett Brothers named their album Mignonette after the ship on which the incident occurred.

The Case of the Speluncean Explorers is a famous hypothetical case created in 1949 by legal theorist Lon L. Fuller to illustrate divergent theories of law and morality in the context of facts heavily based around those in Dudley and Stephens.