The Invention of Murder (11 page)

There appear to be no surviving plays about Burke and Hare in the Lord Chamberlain’s files, although there almost certainly were some productions at the minor theatres, never submitted for a licence. H. Chance Newton, a theatre critic born in 1854, said that among the earliest crime dramas he ever saw was one called
Hawke the Burker.
Leman Blanchard, in 1877, remembered that a theatre called the Shakespeare in Curtain Road, London, had at some time in the past produced ‘a piece founded on the murder of the Italian boy by Burke and Hare’. Whatever Blanchard was remembering had now become hopelessly confused: the murder of ‘the Italian boy’ took place in London in 1831, when two thugs named Bishop and Williams killed Carlo Ferrari, a street beggar, and tried to sell his body; Burke and Hare had no connection to this crime. Cecil Pitt’s
Carlo Ferrari, or, The Murder of the Italian Boy
played at the Britannia in 1869, but it seems unlikely that Blanchard would be so confused about a play that had been staged only eight years previously. Furthermore, the most comprehensive listing of London minor theatres gives only two named the Shakespeare, but neither was in Curtain Road.

By the 1860s, however, there was renewed interest in the Burkers. In 1859 the journalist G.A. Sala published ‘How I went to Sea’, a reminiscence of his schooldays, in which the boys were served up ‘a dreadful pie for dinner every Monday; a meat pie with … horrible lumps of gristle inside, and such strings of sinew (alternated by lumps of flabby fat) … We called it kitten pie – resurrection pie – rag pie – dead man’s pie.’ More soberly, Alexander Leighton, who otherwise specialized in tales of Scottish folklore, brought out
The Courts of Cacus
in 1861. (In Greek myth, Cacus was one of the sons of Vulcan, an eater of human flesh.) This was a highly romanticized novelization, beginning: ‘When the gloaming was setting in of an evening in the autumn of 1827, and when the young students of Dr Knox’s class had covered up those remains of their own kind from which they had been trying to extract nature’s secrets, one was looking listlessly from the window into the Square …’ and continuing with seventy-five pages of colourful tales of resurrection men, before finally getting around to the story of Burke and Hare.

Soon after came
Mary Paterson, or, The Fatal Error,
a serial in twenty-eight parts, by David Pae, a respected Scottish novelist, and pioneer of newspaper serial-fiction. Mary Paterson, the prostitute murdered by Burke and Hare, is here transformed, like Maria Marten, into the most beautiful girl in the village, the daughter of a respected village elder. She is loved by an honest farmer, but, ‘vain, giddy, and thoughtless’, she has ‘given her heart to one who moved in a higher station’, who has ‘wooed her clandestinely for the basest of all purposes’. This is Duncan Grahame, an Edinburgh medical student who is already engaged to his heiress cousin. He makes Mary pregnant and secretes her in a lodging run by Helen McDougal. Mary gives birth, finds out that Grahame is married, and returns home in remorse, only to discover that her aged father has died of grief and the wicked lawyer has managed to gain possession of the family farm – and that’s all in the first fifty pages. We skip over two years, and Mary is now walking the streets, Burke and Hare murder her, and when her corpse inevitably shows up on Grahame’s dissecting table, he is filled with ‘remorseful memories’, as well he might be. There is a particularly nasty section where the farmer, now the guardian of Mary’s child, watches Burke’s execution, ‘clap[ping] his hands with frantic vehemence’. Meanwhile Helen McDougal dies of exposure in a snowstorm, to be found the following spring with her face eaten away by rats; Margaret Hare is washed overboard as she travels back to Ireland; and Hare is set on the road to Carlisle, where we lose sight of him. After a lot of picaresque adventures, finally a murdered hermit is revealed to be Hare, the murderer-in-chief turns out to be Hare’s unknown son, who goes mad, runs amok and kills the alcoholic village doctor, who is – Mary’s Edinburgh student love, Duncan Grahame!

An advertisement for a penny-dreadful on the same subject followed the next year, but no copy of it seems to have survived, so it is unclear if this is Pae’s story repackaged, or whether his serial triggered a revival of interest. Now plays began to be staged. Again, no scripts appear to have survived, or even playbills. But the
Era,
a journal for theatre professionals, has an advertisement in 1867 offering: ‘BURKE and HARE … Manuscripts of this Startling Drama – terrific Situations, and Incidents Unparalleled in History of Fiction – now Ready. Terms moderate’. Over the next forty years, further Burke and Hare advertisements appear, never that many, but regularly: plays for sale, advertisements for a Burke and Hare ‘amusement’ (type unspecified), or a request for employment by a ‘Scotch Actor, accustomed to [play] daft Jemmy’. These plays were probably of the type known as ‘fit-up’, staged by travelling troupes in barns or saloons. One version toured Scotland for decades: the actors knew the outlines of their parts and nightly created their own dialogue, modified to suit the number of actors – if a second low-comedy player was available, an organ grinder was inserted into the action (another conflation with the Italian boy). Local children were always welcome additions as the burkers’ victims.

Only in the 1880s did Burke and Hare begin to appear in literature by writers of quality, and even then it tended to be among their weaker works. Conan Doyle, in his pre-Sherlock Holmes days, produced ‘My Friend the Murderer’, about a New Zealand bushranger who in seven months ‘hocussed and made away with’ twenty or thirty people. When the story begins, he is on the run after turning informer. As with Hare, he is constantly recognized and barely escapes lynching, before he is killed in a brawl. Conan Doyle was piling on effects: the bushranger is called Wolf Tone Maloney, the name echoing that of Theobald Wolfe Tone, the founder of Irish republican separatism. The choice probably reflects Doyle’s deep dislike of such politics (the story was written shortly after the Phoenix Park murders) and is at least an unsubtle reminder of Hare’s Irish origins. Robert Louis Stevenson, two years later, also chose the short-story form for a treatment of Burke and Hare’s crimes. His narrator is Fettes, an alcoholic village doctor, who studied in his youth under ‘a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here designate by the letter K’. Fettes’ job was to deal with ‘the unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table … It was the policy of Mr K—to ask no questions … “They bring the body, and we pay the price.” ‘ But when Fettes recognizes the body of ‘Jane Galbraith’ [Mary Paterson], whom he had seen only the previous night, he knows that the crime is not simply grave robbery. He consults with a more senior student, who tells him to shut his eyes: ‘Do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us – the lions and the lambs. If you’re a lamb, you’ll come to lie upon these tables like … Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a horse like me, like K—, like all the world with any wit or courage.’
*
Then the plot veers off and the two turn resurrection men themselves. One dark night they set out to disinter a newly buried farmer’s wife. On the way home they become more and more uneasy about their gruesome burden, until finally they open the sack. ‘A wild yell rang up into the night’: instead of the farmer’s wife, inside is the body of one of K—’s long-dissected corpses.

The
Pall Mall Gazette,
which published the story in its 1884 Christmas issue, ran an advertising campaign that was long acknowledged as being uniquely macabre: one man remembered ‘posters so horrific that they were suppressed’, another that it had included a procession of sandwich-board men dressed as corpses, carrying their own coffins. While the advertising was unusual, the story was less so. Stevenson had initially set out with a fictionalized version of the facts, only to turn gruesome reality into nothing more than a standard ghost story.

Genre fiction was embracing Burke and Hare. James McGovan, the pseudonym of William Crawford Honeyman (1845–1919), an early writer of detective stories set in Edinburgh, returned frequently to the subject. In ‘The Missing Bookbinder’ a woman consults a detective: ‘If this is no another Burke and Hare business I’ll eat my ain bannet.’ Her sister has vanished from her lodgings at a cobbler’s, and ‘they would get something for her body; and ye ken Burke was a cobbler too, but he found that bodies paid better’. The all-knowing professional is patronizingly dismissive: ‘Nothing could dissuade this big, warm-hearted woman from the idea that doctors were still eager and willing to buy bodies from the first offerer, asking no questions as to how the goods came to be bodies; or from believing that her sister’s delicate frame had been utilised in that manner after the brutal fashion introduced by Burke and Hare.’ (The sister, it turns out, died naturally, but the cobbler registered her death under his wife’s name to get some insurance money.)

The detective’s superior tone was now the prevailing attitude to these anatomization fears. As early as 1844, the comic sporting writer R.S. Surtees had treated the common people’s fascination with Burke and Hare in precisely this manner: when the grand Duke of Donkeyton recommends a speech by the MP and political theorist Edmund Burke: ‘Fine speech of Burke’s; monstrous fine speech,’ but the lower-middle-class Mr Jorrocks knows better: ‘ “He was ‘ung for all that,” observed Mr. Jorrocks to himself, with a knowing shake of the head.’

Finally, Burke and Hare, those thuggish, vicious men, like Thurtell ended up as a children’s jingle:

*  *  *

The crimes of Burke and Hare had convulsed the entire country. Other stories were more local, but in retrospect may have had more importance. Such a one was the killing of John Peacock Wood in 1833.

For decades, policing had been endlessly discussed. Originally, the term ‘police’ had merely meant the administration of a city, and the civic well-being that followed (the word derives from the same source as ‘policy’); but during the French Revolution ‘police’ in France began to mean the men who were charged with maintaining ‘public order, liberty, property, individual safety’; in Britain, nothing like it existed. Even a century earlier, a French visitor had been amazed: ‘Good Lord!’ he cried, ‘how can one expect order among these people, who have no such word as Police in their Language.’ The government regularly called out the army to control mobs and quell uprisings, but there was no civil force whose job included the prevention and detection of crime. This lack was considered a virtue: Fouché’s police force was regarded as nothing but a nest of paid governmental spies.

Before 1829, changes to the parish and watch systems had been blocked by a coalition of right-wing ‘county’ elements joined by their opposite numbers, the political Radicals. Both groups feared, for different reasons, that a professional force would destroy civil liberties, bring in a system of secret-service spying to consolidate political power and introduce what was, in effect, a standing army. In short, they believed the new police would be ‘expensive, tyrannical, and foreign’, and most people felt they would ‘rather be robb’d. by wretches of desperate fortune than by ministers’. Nonetheless, the Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel, a political operator of brilliance, persuaded many that the rise in crime made some sort of solution imperative. There probably was no such rise – there was a rise in prosecutions, the consequence of a change in social expectations, and a growing intolerance of disorder; there were also more governmental surveys and early attempts at statistical analysis of crime figures. Together these created an appearance of increasing crime. Peel may or may not have understood that this was a difference in perception, not reality; in either case he used this perception to promote his end.
*

For the most part, over the previous two decades high-profile stranger-murders requiring this new type of policing had been rare: the Ratcliffe Highway murders, the death of Spencer Perceval, and Burke and Hare. The other cases that had attracted attention were domestic, and were easily dealt with by older methods – Corder, Fenning (pp.183–200), Scanlan (pp.130–39), even Thurtell had killed an acquaintance. But the times were uneasy, people apprehensive. The end of the French wars had seen the return of large numbers of suddenly unemployed men inured to violent death; high food prices and chronic unemployment were producing ever more incidents of civic unrest, from machine-breaking to the Corn Bill Riots, the Spa Field Riots, bread and wage riots and Peterloo. Now the police were presented as agents who would prevent civic disorder.

Thus on 29 September 1829, parishes within twelve miles of Charing Cross saw the first ‘new police’ on the streets: five divisions, with 144 Metropolitan Police constables apiece. Within eight months there were 3,200 men, all dressed in blue. The Bow Street Runners had worn red waistcoats, but otherwise dressed in civilian clothes. The new police’s uniforms had been carefully chosen to indicate their professionalism, while at the same time the colour had been selected to reassure the population that, unlike the red-coated army, this was a civil, not a military force. (Not that the new colour choice made much difference: the police were quickly dubbed ‘raw lobsters’ or ‘the unboiled’. An unboiled lobster is blue; when it is put in hot water it turns red. Thus a policeman was only ‘hot water’ away from being a soldier.) The uniform was also protective: the stock at the neck was leather, not linen, and the rabbit-skin top hat had a reinforced leather top and bracing; according to one policeman’s memoir, it weighed eighteen ounces. (In 1864 it was replaced by the ‘Roman’ helmet that is still worn.) The only weapon carried was a baton, with a rattle (replaced by a whistle in 1884) to summon aid.

Peel’s instructions for the new police stressed that constables ‘will be civil and obliging to all people’, while being ‘particularly cautious not to interfere idly or unnecessarily in order to make a display of his authority’. ‘The object to be attained is the prevention of crime,’ yet the police also had what today would be called ‘caring’ roles in their communities: looking after ‘insane persons and children’, ensuring that street nuisances (rubbish, waste, building materials) were removed, enforcing Sunday trading laws and preserving public order. The middle classes quickly came to accept this ideal as the reality, while the working classes were less persuaded, frequently with good reason. The early recruits were not exactly the
crème de la crème,
and of the initial intake of 2,800 men, 2,238 were swiftly dismissed, 1,790 for drunkenness.