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

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:

Up the close and doun the stair,

But and ben wi’ Burke and Hare.

Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief,

Knox the boy that buys the beef.

* * *

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.

This distrust came to a head in three separate incidents in 1833. The first was what became known as the Cold Bath Field riot. In May a group of workers calling themselves the National Political Union organized a rally in London. Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, ruled it an unlawful assembly, and flyers were posted warning the population not to participate. On the morning of 13 May about seventy-five constables were stationed near Cold Bath Field, the planned rallying point, with reinforcements backing them up – altogether, about 450 men were on call. When the workers arrived, the police superintendent moved his men in. Bricks were thrown, baton charges were led, many were injured, three constables were stabbed and one died. The policeman in command, Superintendent Mays, claimed he and his men had marched slowly down the street towards the speakers’ platform, planning to arrest the leaders and give the crowds time to leave under their own steam. They only charged, he said, when bricks and stones were thrown; he also claimed that the rioters had guns (although everyone agreed that no shot had been fired). On the other side, eye-witnesses reported that the police had charged immediately, indiscriminately attacking men, women and children, many of whom had nothing to do with the rally, but were simply passers-by. The officers made no attempts to rein in their men, and the crowd response was purely self-defence. The jury at the inquest on PC Robert Culley reached a verdict of justifiable homicide, noting that the Riot Act had not been read, which made the police charge illegal.*This verdict was quashed on appeal, and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry found that the police had not used excessive force. This was decidedly not the public’s view. The caricaturist Robert Cruikshank wrote a savage attack on the authorities, inflating the number of police to eight hundred, and suggesting that Culley had probably been stabbed by another policeman. He ended by parodying Peel’s instructions with a set of his own ‘Necessary Qualifications’ for policemen: ‘He must be utterly destitute of all feelings of humanity … He must qualify himself for action, by knocking down, every half hour, all the poor fruit-women he can find and other peaceable hardworking people, who endeavor [sic] to get an honest livelihood to support their large families. If able to perjure himself with a clear conscience he may depend upon speedy promotion.’

While the inquest and inquiry were continuing, public outrage was exacerbated by the ongoing case of Popay, known generally as ‘the police spy’. William Popay was a police sergeant sent to infiltrate the National Political Union. He pretended to be an artist and attended meetings in ‘coloured clothes’ (plainclothes), acting as an agent provocateur, inciting his supposed fellow workers to illegal actions. When he was unmasked, earlier fears about the true nature of the police force seemed to be justified. It was, said the Radicals, nothing but a government-sanctioned spy network, paid for, to add insult to injury, out of working men’s taxes. Another select committee was set up, but before it could deliver its report the death of John Peacock Wood suddenly assumed significance.

Wood should have had no fame at all. He was a waterside character in Wapping, by the London docks, an amiable drunk, a man of no trade or settled way of life. But he was harmless. On the night before his death he was drinking at the White Hart tavern with a friend, his wife and the landlady. According to witnesses at the inquest, a squabble arose over who was to pay for a pint, and this attracted the attention of a policeman, who ‘laid hold of the deceased, and shoved him “right slap” into the street’, where he fell on the pavement. A succession of witnesses agreed that Wood had been knocked down by a policeman, while another constable was seen with ‘a stick in his hand’, and another ‘lift[ed] the man up, whose head fell again to the pavement; the blow was violent’. It was not the first blow, either: the policeman’s hands were ‘stained with blood’. Somehow it took four policemen an hour to carry Wood the 250 yards from the tavern to the police station. A man in the cells saw him dragged by his feet into a cell (‘A deep murmur and expression of horror here burst forth’), where he was left until ten o’clock the next morning, at which point a doctor was sent for. Wood was treated and taken home, but he died that afternoon of a fractured skull caused, said a doctor, not ‘by a lateral fall, but. by a large round stick’.

It was not just the death, but the behaviour of the police and the coroner at the inquest that incensed the population. The police swore that the cells’ other occupant could not have witnessed Wood’s treatment, because he had been discharged at six (said the charge book), or maybe it was 2.30 (the inspector). The police were permitted to sit in the court before they testified, unlike the other witnesses, which meant that they would be able to tailor their evidence. (The coroner stoutly protested that no policeman would think of doing any such thing.) At an identification parade the constables arrived dressed in street clothes, rather than their uniforms – to evade recognition, thought many.

The fractious bickering between jury and coroner continued for thirteen hours on the first day. On the second, four doctors testified that Wood’s fracture had been caused by a truncheon-shaped object. Another witness testified to seeing him being chased by the police, but the coroner refused to accept this evidence, dismissing it as ‘disgraceful’. A juror snapped back, ‘If an honest perseverance to elicit the truth was disgraceful, he would admit that their conduct throughout the whole proceedings was disgraceful indeed.’ The coroner backed down, mumbling that it was ‘the firing and cross-firing’ of questions that he had been referring to, before adjourning the sitting.

On the third day, another twelve hours was spent on the case. A number of policemen testified to the very great care they had lavished on the unconscious Wood. One ‘burst into tears, and said he had an aged mother, whose feelings had been much hurt by his name being mixed up with the affair’. A juryman, unmoved, asked him if it were not true that he had previously ‘broken a man’s head with his truncheon’. The coroner refused to let him answer the question, and the court was adjourned in uproar once again.

On day four, a witness agreed with the police account, testifying that she had seen Wood carried carefully. On cross-examination, however, it was found that her evidence matched nothing that anyone else had seen that night, that it followed a private interview with the police inspector before the hearing, and furthermore that she had been seen drinking with another policeman only that morning. The coroner said he had received a note suggesting that Wood’s head ‘might have been accidentally struck against a beam at the entrance of the station-house’, but even the police agreed that that was not possible, and ‘the Foreman of the Jury observed – “The writer of the note must have had a beam in his eye.” ‘

On the fifth day, a witness who testified against the police was so confused and contradictory that the jury showed their independence of mind by saying they refused to believe a word. The solicitor watching proceedings for the police leapt up and asked that the witness be committed for perjury, at which the jury noted sourly that none of the police witnesses who had obviously lied had been so threatened. The coroner, not knowing when to let well alone, smugly commented, ‘I hope that the eyes of the Jury are now opened. I cannot but say from my heart, that there is not a tittle of evidence that can be relied on against the police: not a tittle that can be placed in comparison with the manly, straightforward evidence given by the police themselves … I cannot help saying, that since the Court was opened, the Jury have pursued a course such as I have never before witnessed in the course of my life, and such as I hope never to see again.’ The jury cried, ‘“Shame, shame!” and with clenched fists approached the Coroner … An indescribable scene of confusion followed. The people in the room united in the vociferations of the Jury, and the crowd in the street. expressed their approbation by loud shouting and clapping of hands.’ The coroner realized the position he’d put himself in, and added hastily, ‘I feel deep sorrow for having expressed myself in a manner disagreeable to the Jury, whose conduct, it is my duty to state, as far as the ends of truth and justice are concerned, does them great credit: I did not mean in what I said to censure them morally.’ The jury were having none of it, and the foreman responded: ‘We stand here as honest men, having characters to support, and I can say before God, that I came into this room unbiassed against the police. Nothing that can be said to us, in the way of censure, can affect our verdict. If we are to be taxed with having a bias against the police, I, for one, would lay down my fine of 10l. [for refusing jury service], and walk home.’ Then the coroner tried to speak, but one of the jury interrupted him: ‘You have called us biassed men; we have been ill treated by you individually and collectively: your conduct has been most partial [great confusion].’ The inquest was once more adjourned.

When it resumed, the coroner finally summed up: ‘When I found that some members of the Jury endeavoured to degrade my office [the Jury here exclaimed that they did not], and to impugn my impartiality – when I perceived the spirit of persecution in which the examinations were conducted [cries of ‘No, no!’], and the intemperate manner in which all interference on behalf of the police was resisted – I felt bound by every obligation … to extend the broad shield of the Judge over the devoted heads of the policemen, and protect them from the cruel inquisition to which they were exposed.’ He then admitted that he might have been led into ‘some warmth of expression’, which he regretted. The jury took three hours to consider their verdict (this in an age when death sentences were routinely agreed in twenty minutes), returning with a verdict of ‘Wilful Murder against some policeman unknown’, adding a rider that the death certificate should be altered to read ‘We are of opinion [sic] the murder was committed with a truncheon by a policeman of the K Division.’ The coroner responded coldly: ‘The verdict is yours, and not mine, and on you rests the responsibility.’

And there the case rested: no one was ever identified, so no one was ever charged. But a few weeks later, the House of Commons reported on Popay, condemning his behaviour as ‘highly reprehensible’ and blaming his superiors for their lack of proper supervision. The public too made its feelings known: on Guy Fawkes Night, the two police commissioners, Richard Mayne and Charles Rowan, were burnt in effigy on local bonfires, together with a third guy, labelled ‘Justifiable Homicide’.

The following year, the police distinguished themselves even less, demonstrating the limitations of preventative policing. This time it was not the murder of a friendly drunk, but of a respectable member of the merchant class. Thomas Ashton, the twenty-two-year-old son of a mill owner, had left the family house at Gee Cross, near Ashton-under-Lyne (now part of Greater Manchester), at 7.30 one evening in 1834 to deputize for his brother at their father’s Apethorne factory (Ashton usually managed another family mill, at Woodley). Minutes later, a messenger from the mill rushed in: ‘He believed Mr. Thomas was down in the lane, and hurt.’ Mr Thomas was not hurt, but either dying or dead, having been shot at point-blank range. At the inquest, a nine-year-old girl said that she had seen three men on the road, and thought one of them had been carrying a gun, which he tried to conceal as she passed. A book-keeper from the mill testified that three men had been sacked the week before, ‘for irregularity in their general conduct’, but none of them was known to have made any threats against any of the Ashton family, and one had already been rehired. This was a time of great labour unrest, and there was some discussion about whether the men had belonged to the Spinners’ Union, but no evidence was offered, and in any case the Ashton mills were in full employment. Mention was made of a ‘piece of thin and soft blue or purple paper’ which had probably been used as wadding in the gun that was fired, but this clue seemed to lead nowhere. The jury brought in a verdict of ‘wilful murder against three persons at present unknown’, and the government offered a £600 reward.

The Manchester Guardian said that the perpetrators must have been outsiders: not only had no one recognized them, but they had made no attempt to hide their faces, as though they had no fear of recognition. The case remained in limbo for three years, until William (or James, depending on which newspaper you read) Garside, in gaol for stealing tools, told the authorities that he knew something about the murder. He refused to speak to the magistrate, however, until a three-year-old copy of the Hue and Cry *was found, to prove to him that the government was offering a reward (now raised to £1,500) and a pardon to anyone except the person who had actually fired the gun who could give information leading to the discovery of the murderers. Garside could not read, but the offer was read aloud to him. As a result he admitted to being present at the crime, and named two brothers, Joseph and William Moseley, as the perpetrators.