truepenny | UBC: Rosner, The Anatomy Murders

The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes by Lisa Rosner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

[library]

Up the close & down the stair / But & ben wi' Burke & Hare / Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief / And Knox the boy that buys the beef.
--Anonymous doggerel

Like anyone who's interested in criminological historiography (such a mouthful, but it means what I want to mean), I am fascinated by Burke & Hare. Serial killers (16 victims) for the profit to be made by selling their bodies to anatomical lecturers in Edinburgh's cutthroat anatomy class market. (No, really.) Stranger murder (why, no, 20th century America, you did NOT invent it), but not for sex or anger or any deep psychological motive at all. It was just the easiest way to make money they'd ever found.

I had read Roughead, and I knew that, while entertaining, he wasn't very accurate. This is an excellent corrective, well-written, interested in exploring everyone's side of the story without in any way soft-pedaling or condoning what was going on. She's not as explicitly and programmatically interested in the lives of the urban poor as Sarah Wise is in The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London, but the story of Burke & Hare is saturated in the realities of the lives and deaths of the destitute in Edinburgh in the 1820s.

And one of the ways that those realities impact the story is that there's so little of it left. We know almost nothing about Hare, not very much more about Burke or Helen M'Dougal or Margaret Hare. Nobody was interested in their biographies; nobody asked Burke to explain himself, only to confess. And after he was hanged, the other three just vanish. They leave no trace of themselves in the historical record, only some rumors and urban legends and outright folktales. (The idea that Hare ended up a blind beggar in London, having been blinded by his co-workers at a lime pit when they discovered who he was . . . that's a folktale. You can see the structure of it.) Burke & Hare didn't even know the names of some of the people they killed, and of course there's nowhere to file a missing persons report, and really no one to file it. All of the working class people in this story are transient, following jobs (the Irish were migrant workers in Scotland, a tide that ebbed and flowed with the harvest; both Burke & Hare probably ended up Edinburgh that way themselves), staying with family or friends or friends of friends or people they met in the street while they tried to find employment or get back to Ireland. It would be difficult for anyone to be sure that any of them had actually disappeared. And even the people who had families . . . there was just no structure in place to find people.

And Knox and his students did such a beautiful job of destroying the evidence.

(Knox had to know. Or he had to have made a deliberate choice to not know. Given what a consummate self-absorbed asshole he was, it's not surprising that he made that choice.)

This was fascinating for me as someone interested in Burke & Hare, but it was also fascinating for the context it gave them.

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