The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime

Melodrama, too, took Maria Marten to its heart. The earliest stage version of the story was announced at the Pavilion Theatre, Mile End, shortly after the trial, and there is a brief outline of the scenes in the playbill. In Act I, Corder promises to marry Maria, but is already planning her betrayal: ‘The deed were bloody, sure, but I will do’t …’ After Maria’s murder, her mother wakes from a nightmare: ‘Help, help! My child! I saw her, sure, lifeless, smeared with blood! ‘Twas in the Red Barn! – and there stood Corder with a pickaxe digging out her grave.’ When Mr Marten discovers the body, there is an ‘affecting scene’: ‘she was the darling of my age, the prop of my existence’. In the final scene in Bury Gaol, Maria appears to Corder as a ghost. His last words are ‘Guilt, guilt … I am, I am her murderer!’

This story remained a favourite: a version in Cheltenham in 1828 had Miss Marten shot in front of the audience’s eyes; a production in Weymouth introduced gypsies into the plot (this element swiftly infiltrated most productions, usually in the guise of Pharos Lee, the renamed Runner); there was a Welsh version in 1829, in Monmouth and later in Cardiff; an undated production in Swansea; a production in Hull advertised ‘Maria Marlin [sic], the Pride of the Village’, who after death conducts her mother to her resting place ‘IN A FLAME OF FIRE’. In an early 1860s version, James Lee, the Bow Street Runner who had arrested Corder, now aged seventy-six, recreated his arrest onstage for a benefit performance. *All of these productions conformed to the standard melodrama casting, with Corder played by the ‘heavy’; Mr Marten the ‘second heavy’, or ‘heavy father’; Tim Bobbin, the comic servant, by the ‘first low comedian’; Mrs Marten the ‘character old woman’; and Maria herself, the ‘leading lady’.

Despite the multiplicity of productions, only two Red Barn scripts survive from the nineteenth century, one from what may be the Swansea production, the second from an 1890s northern touring company. The Swansea production conforms to all the standard melodrama requirements: it has the aged father blessing his child’s forthcoming marriage, the comic servants, the villain resolved on murder, the beautiful heroine pleading for her life ‘For my aged parents’ sake’, ‘the voice of Heaven conveying to a mother’s heart the murder of her darling child’, and finally, forgiveness for the sinner, amidst scenic effects in the condemned cell: ‘Ghost music. Blue fire. The spirit of Maria Marten appears.’ Corder confesses, ‘Bell tolls. Characters form picture [that is, stand frozen in a tableau]. Blue fire.’

By the 1890s, melodrama was no longer treated entirely seriously. A Manchester revival had music-hall turns interpolated into the story: ‘Sometimes the actor brings in a sly sentence in a burlesque of a line in Hamlet, and sometimes the house is made to roar over an allusion to a great cabbage which is brought on the stage.’ There was also a role for the ‘intelligent donkey, Jerry’, who would ‘prove that all men are descended from donkeys’, not to mention an unexplained ‘statue song’ and some dancing.

Long before the intelligent donkey took over, more frightening murderers were to stalk the stage. These were two Irishmen living in Edinburgh: William Burke and William Hare. Burke and Hare were, if you will, pioneers of capitalism, meeting rising demand with a more efficient supply. Medical schools officially used only the corpses of executed criminals for dissection, but by the late 1820s demand far outstripped the number of criminals executed – in Surgeons’ Square, Edinburgh, alone there were six lecturers on anatomy, all of whom required bodies on which to demonstrate. Thus, most medical schools quietly dealt with resurrection men, men who stole recently buried corpses from cemeteries. This was semi-illegal (‘semi’ because dead bodies in law belonged to no one; resurrectionists could be charged only with stealing grave clothes), but for the most part the trade was winked at.

The resurrection market was, however, tightly controlled, and two good-for-nothings like Burke and Hare had no hope of entering this macabre profession. These two men, whose names became synonyms for brutal murder, stumbled into their occupation by chance. Burke had been a navvy on the Union Canal, and then a cobbler; Hare kept a poor man’s lodging house in Tanner’s Close, where a third-share in a bed could be purchased for 3d. a night. Sometime in 1827, Burke and his common-law wife Helen McDougal moved in with Hare and his wife Margaret, after their own lodgings had burned down. Together they drank and got through life as best they could until a pensioner named Dougal died owing Hare rent. Burke and Hare recouped the debt by selling his body to Dr Knox, who ran one of Edinburgh’s three anatomy schools. To their astonishment, they received £7.10s. for the body – easily six months’ pay for an unskilled labourer. They lived off this windfall for the entire winter, and it was only in the new year that they realized that even £7.10s. would not keep them for ever. But old, frail people with no family ties don’t die on command. Then they had their brainwave – old, frail people with no family ties died every day among Edinburgh’s underclass, and no one questioned the death of one pauper more or less. So Burke, the more personable character, lured the unwary to Hare’s lodgings, where the two men gave them a drink and, when they were pleasantly fuddled, asphyxiated them. Then there was another fresh corpse for Dr Knox, and another few months’ income for the Burke and Hare families. In February 1828 an old woman, name unknown, vanished from their lodgings; sometime later that winter so did ‘Joseph the miller’. There were possibly more before Mary Paterson, a local prostitute, was disposed of the same way in April. But the pair were getting reckless. Mary Paterson’s friend Janet Brown had accompanied her when Burke enticed them to his lodgings, offering to keep them in fine style. Mary became stupefied with drink, but Janet left before she reached that stage. There was now a witness to the fact that at least one person had visited the Tanner’s Close lodging house and then vanished. Mary Paterson had been dead only five or six hours when her body was purchased by Dr Knox’s attendant. Yet no questions were asked about her obviously recent death, nor the lack of any indication that she had ever been buried. In his confession, Burke said no questions ever were asked. The assistant who bought Mary Paterson’s corpse was one William Fergusson – later Sir William Fergusson Bart, FRS, Serjeant-Surgeon to Queen Victoria and President of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Fergusson and his associates regularly paid Burke and Hare between £8 and £10 per corpse, and things went on smoothly until October 1828, when hubris was followed by nemesis. James Wilson, or ‘Daft Jamie’, was their next victim. Daft Jamie was a well-known Edinburgh street character who lived by begging and petty trading. He was about twenty years old at the time of his murder, physically large, but simple-minded and with a physical handicap, possibly club feet. It appears that Jamie refused the offers of alcohol, and thus, unlike all the other victims, was young, strong and sober, and able to fight back. Burke and Hare finally overpowered him, but it was impossible that his body showed no signs of violent death. It was even more impossible that no one would recognize his corpse. Some of the students did, but this simply hastened the dissection. Daft Jamie’s head and feet, which would have been familiar to many, were kept separate, again contrary to practice, as if Dr Knox and his assistants wanted to get rid of the recognizable bits first.

Even then, Burke and Hare continued unchecked. Their final victim was an elderly Irishwoman named Docherty. The Burkes had lodgers sharing their room, an ex-soldier named Gray and his wife. They were asked to move to Burke’s brother’s room for the night so the Burkes could entertain their ‘kinswoman’. The next morning, the Grays were told that she had become drunk and quarrelsome, so they had sent her on her way, Burke adding, ‘She’s quiet enough now.’ They also told Mrs Gray to stay away from a pile of straw in the corner. She had never been forbidden any area of their room before, so when the Burkes went out she investigated, and uncovered the corpse of an old woman. The couple, shocked, told Mrs Hare, who blandly offered them £10 to keep quiet. They left and notified the police.

By the time the police arrived, there was no body, but it was soon located in Dr Knox’s rooms, and the story unfolded. The Burkes and the Hares were all arrested, yet a successful prosecution was uncertain. The medical evidence for death by asphyxiation without violence on an old and frail woman like Mrs Docherty would be minimal, and apart from this one body, all the previous ‘sales’ had already been disposed of through the dissecting room. Hare was therefore chosen to turn king’s evidence, particularly as, if he had been charged, Margaret Hare would not have been able to testify against her husband.* It was Hare’s evidence that enabled indictments to be laid against Burke and his wife, Helen McDougal, on 8 December, for the murders of Mrs Docherty, Mary Paterson and Daft Jamie, and it was these three murders that formed the basis of the prosecution’s case.

Huge crowds surrounded the court for the trial, with three hundred special constables drafted in to hold people back, and the cavalry and infantry on standby. The trial lasted two days – 24 and 25 December – and it took the jury only fifty minutes to find Burke guilty, and the case against McDougal ‘not proven’.† Burke was sentenced to be hanged, dissected and anatomized. Helen McDougal was officially released, but was kept in custody to protect her from the mob, who felt that she too should be ‘burked’. The Hares were kept in prison while the courts heard a suit by Daft Jamie’s mother to bring a private prosecution for his death; when that failed, another civil action, for ‘assythment’, or compensation, kept them imprisoned until after Burke’s execution.

All three ultimately skulked out of town, trying to escape their notoriety. Hare was recognized in Dumfries, and a crowd estimated at 8,000 gathered, hoping to lynch him. It took a hundred special constables to rescue him, and he was kept in prison overnight for his own protection before being set on the road to Carlisle. McDougal, according to one broadside, was recognized as she was attempting to get passage to Ireland, and at a cry of ‘Hare’s wife! Burke her!’ a mob gathered. Legends of the afterlife of all three abounded, particularly for Hare – he was said to have been tossed in a lime kiln and blinded, or to have ended as a beggar on London’s Oxford Street – but nothing more is known of any of them.

Public interest in the case was all-consuming. In 1815, in his novel Guy Mannering, Walter Scott had briefly mentioned the earlier case of Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, ‘resurrection women’, as he styled them. They had promised to procure a child’s body for a surgeon and, no child having conveniently died, they murdered one. Now Scott, sorry to be away during Burke’s trial, was amused to receive that same month ‘a very polite card from the Medical Society inviting me to dine with them. It sounded like a card from Mr Thurtell inviting one to a share of his gig.’ At the same time an enterprising citizen had rented Hare’s cellar, and was showing it ‘for a trifle’ to visitors who queued twenty deep to have a look, and Scott was a wry observer of the ‘well dress’d females’ who visited it: ‘I did not go. although the newspapers reported me one of the visitors.’*

Everything to do with the case was enthusiastically retailed in the newspapers. The Aberdeen Journal gave four of its five columns to the trial transcript, plus an editorial, and then ended with the rather naked hope that a local woman, one ‘Abigail Simpson, a miserable old woman, a pauper’, who had vanished some time before, might also have been one of the victims. The Courant’s circulation increased by 8,000 copies on the day it reported the trial. Nothing was too minor to be repeated, and, in default of other news, repeated several times. Many newspapers, rather than sending their own journalists, simply copied other papers’ reports, creating an echo chamber of innuendo and rumour. This applied to the London dailies as well as the smaller provincial weeklies or bi-weeklies. The Times had no non-Scottish-sourced article on Burke and Hare until after Burke’s conviction, and even then it was only an editorial. That same day, an article on Burke’s confession stressed that ‘The information from which the following article is drawn up we have received from a most respectable quarter’ – but that ‘we’ is somewhat fudged, as the entire article, ‘we’ included, is an unacknowledged reprint from the Caledonian Mercury.

The crowd at Burke’s execution – perhaps 20,000 people – cheered as the scaffold was built. For most executions, the labourers who constructed the scaffold drew lots to decide which of them would perform the hateful task. This time there were volunteers. Not for this crowd the respect frequently given to a gallant outlaw, or the pity for a pathetic victim only too closely resembling themselves. When Burke appeared, the crowd screamed its hatred: ‘The murderer! burke him! choke him!’ A journalist reported one spectator ‘hallooing and encouraging the mob to persevere in these manifestations of their feelings’, raising a roar each time the dying Burke was convulsed, conducting the crowd’s response until the body was cut down. The Times, normally quick to condemn not only the behaviour of the crowds at an execution, but their very presence, praised these outbursts as ‘ebullitions of virtuous and honest resentment. we honour them for it’.

As Burke’s body was removed from the scaffold, souvenir-hunters descended, grabbing at shavings from the coffin, or pieces of the rope.As usual, these relic-gatherers were condemned by the middle-class press. Yet middle-class scavengers were every bit as avid: a wallet made from Burke’s scalp is in the History of Surgery Museum in Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons. Meanwhile Burke’s corpse took the same trip to an anatomy theatre as had many of those he had accompanied. This time, though, it was to the rooms of Professor Monro, a competitor of Knox, who was keeping a very low profile. First the grandees got a private viewing – the surgeon Robert Liston; the phrenologist George Combe; his follower, the sculptor Samuel Joseph, who took a cast of Burke’s head; and Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and Combe’s enemy, as a debunker of phrenology. Then Monro performed a public dissection, initially delayed by a riot staged by the vast number of students refused entry. The police restored order only when they promised that all would get a turn, fifty at a time. The next day, there was a display of the now-anatomized corpse for non-medical visitors. Visitors filed past Burke’s body between ten in the morning and dusk – perhaps as many as 30,000 came through the anatomy theatre. One man recorded in his diary: ‘Burke’s body was lying stretched out on a table in a large sort of lumber or dissecting room, quite naked. The upper part of the skull had been sawn off and the brain extracted, but in other respects he was untouched, except, indeed, that the hair had been all shaven off his body.’

All of these episodes were repeatedly recounted, not only in the newspapers, but in broadsides and ballads. The distinction between these forms of news was less rigid than it seems retrospectively. ‘The Confession of Burk’ [sic] is a broadside, but the content is in fact a reprint of news that had appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant the previous Saturday, while some of the newspapers elaborated an already extraordinary story with fictional devices: the Aberdeen Journal evidently saw no crossing of boundaries when it described, as though by an eye-witness, the death of one of the elderly victims.

This type of true-crime fiction was spreading. The Murderers of the Close was what today would be called a novelization, with ‘conversations put into the mouths of the different persons, as well as a few of the events, trifling in themselves, [that] are indeed fictitious’. The story sticks pretty closely to fact, with additional dialogue tacked on for drama or pathos. The book ends with Burke’s execution, and his religious meditations and remorse, and Hare’s escape, rounded off with pious thoughts for all. The illustrations were provided by Robert Seymour, whose fame was otherwise for comic imagery. (Seven years later he was to suggest to his publisher creating a series of comic illustrations, with text to be provided by a young journalist. Mr Charles Dickens duly agreed, and what became The Pickwick Papers was born.)

Actual Burke and Hare comedy was supplied by ‘Mansie Wauch’s Dream’ in the Aberdeen Journal the month after Burke’s execution. ‘Mansie Wauch’ was a fictional creation of David Macbeth Moir, a Scottish doctor, whose Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor had appeared in Blackwood’s magazine and then in book form the previous year. Now, in his dream, Mansie is assaulted and boxed up for Dr Knox. First he is sanguine: ‘I had once dined with Dr Knox, and had some hope that, if I were beside him, I had a fair chance for my life.’ But when he is unpacked in the dissecting room, he hears Knox saying, ‘[T]his is indeed a prize; you have heard of Mansie Wauch, that’s him. I’d get five guineas for his skull from Mr—, the Phrenological Lecturer.’ ‘[M]y hopes in his mercy vanished like the morning dew,’ despairs Mansie, but fortunately the phrenologist is unwilling to buy a burked corpse. And so Mansie takes heart and shouts: ‘Murder – murder! I am Burked, but I winna be Knoxed.’

Unlike their practice with Maria Marten, the theatres in Britain at first held off from transforming this ugly story into melodrama. Not so in France, where the father of melodrama, René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt (1773–1844), adapted it immediately as Alice, ou, Les Fossoyeurs écossais (‘Alice, or, The Scottish Grave-diggers’). Alice, a poor orphan, works for her aunt, a French innkeeper, and is in love with their lodger Edouard, a Scottish medical student. When he is wounded in a duel, Alice absents herself on mysterious trips, which the audience understands are to raise money for his medical care by in some way selling her body to be anatomized while she is alive – she daily ‘bares her arm to the unskilled knife of a young surgeon’, we are told vaguely. Edouard, recovered, goes home to Scotland to see his dying mother, and never returns. The abandoned Alice travels to Inverness, where Edouard confesses that he now has a rich fiancée. Alice then mysteriously vanishes, and in the last scene three resurrection men, Burke, Mac-Dougall and Rosbiff, arrive to sell Edouard a corpse, which is of course Alice. A very similar if much less elaborate British short story on the theme appeared two years later, when ‘The Victim. A True Story. By a Medical Student’ was published in the New Monthly Magazine. Again, a medical student’s fiancée vanishes, he buys a corpse from ‘an exhumator’, and it again turns out to be the missing fiancée, at which point the student goes mad.

Apart from these two forays, Burke and Hare provided little immediately in the way of popular entertainment that we know of. Generally the story was transformed into urban legend and scandalized word of mouth – in the early 1830s a friend of the poet John Clare was warned that trapdoors on London’s streets were left open deliberately, for the unwary to fall into underground lairs where they were robbed, killed and sold to the doctors. However, one newspaper reference to a fairground exhibition might indicate that there were ephemeral shows that were never recorded. The Examiner recorded that at Barnet, then a town outside London, an exhibition of some form of painted display, possibly a long, panoramic illustration on rolled canvas, showed the murderous pair at work, ‘certified to be correct to the minutest particular’. It had apparently also been shown in Edinburgh, and was to tour further.

There were a few other scattered references. Madame Tussaud, the founder of the waxworks dynasty and creator of the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ (at this date more sedately known as the ‘Separate Room’), had arrived in England in 1802, with models of the heads of executed French revolutionary heroes and villains. She spent the next thirty years touring the country, and in 1829, sixteen days after Burke’s execution, the Liverpool Mercury reported that she had on display ‘a likeness of the Monster Burke said to be taken from a mask of his face. we have no doubt that it will cause her exhibition to be crowded by persons anxious to see the features of a wretch whose crimes have hardly any parallels’. Two years later an advertisement for her show in Bristol promised that ‘THE BAND WILL PLAY EVERY EVENING’ while visitors examined both Burke and Hare’s features.

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!