BOOKS.
BURKE AND HARE.*
To BURRE.—To murder in the same, manner as Burke did. FIGURATIVELY, Lord George Bentinck in CROKER PAPERS : " Disraeli's last speech was altogether burked in the ' " — The NEW ENGLISH DICTIONARY.
ALL people who are interested in murder stories and in the drama and dialectic of great trials will be delighted with Mr. William Roughead's Burke and Hare. Tine work of compilation has been done with great ability and with great fullness. We are not put off with devitalized abstracts and fourth-hand summaries of imperfect reports, but are given the full evidence, the verbatim addresses made to the jury by counsel, the summing up of the judges, and all the important law papers in the case. Again, there are copious quotations from the Press of the period, and an ample bibliography in regard to what Mr. Roughead in his dedication calls " Scotland's greatest criminal case." Before we get to the cause we may congratulate the author, the publisher, and all concerned in the production of the book for the very reasonable sum of 258. 6d.—the price at which the book is published. That is, no doubt, a big price in one sense, but, considering the immensely increased price of books, it is a very moderate sum for a work with so many very well-produced illustrations, over four hundred pages of matter, printed on very good paper. It is a creditable piece of book production for all concerned.
How was it that the brutal murders committed by Burke and Hare exercised such an astonishing fascination for our forefathers both in Scotland and England ? Why was the impact on the popular mind so greatly different not merely in degree but in kind from that made by the ordinary murder, however brutal 7 • Burke and Flare. By William Roughead. London : William Bodge% [25e. 6d. net.] The reverberation of the crimes of Burke and Hare was greater even than that of the criminal who provided the peg for De Quin- eey's Murder as a Fine Art. Take, for example, Sir Walter Scott, Eft expert in State trials, who owing to his professional presence in the Edinburgh courts and as a Scottish Sheriff was fully acquainted with the working of the criminal law. One might have thought that he would not bother his head with any trial or execution in the year 1828—one of the years of his deepest anxiety and depression. Yet he took the greatest possible interest in the Burke and Hare case, and almost certainly attended the execution. The present book gives an account of the endeavours of his friends to get him a good place from which to view the scaffold and gallows.
In our view, the strange way in which the public mind was affected by the Burke and Hare murders is to be accounted for by the fact that these murders constituted an absolutely new element in the record of homicide. Up till the Burke and Hare case people believed that men only committed murder—i.e., killed with intent to kill—for three reasons : (1) To get possession of money ; (2) to revenge great injuries ; (3) to satisfy a sudden outburst of animal passion.
Burke and Hare, or rather Burke, for Hare was, after all, only his tool, discovered and exploited a new ground for taking human life. Burke's victims were all poor people, generally the poorest of the poor—men and women who could hardly keep themselves alive, and whose wretched possessions could be of no possible use to the murderer. They owned, or appeared to own, nothing. But the cunning Burke saw deeper than the ordinary man. He knew, and made a dreadful use of his knowledge, that though a man was worth nothing alive, he was worth £10 dead to sell to the surgeons. The great demand for bodies for dissection in a place like Edinburgh, thronged by medical students, eager to witness and profit by dissections, and filled with professors as eager to lecture and demonstrate on " a subject " made the market for bodies one in which trade was exceedingly brisk. You had only to bring a corpse to a certain dissecting room to get money down instantly and no questions asked. When Burke was caught almost in the act the whole story came out. The public suddenly realized that poverty was not merely no protection against the knife of the murderer but was a positive incitement to murder. The rich were safe, but suddenly the poor had begun to go in deadly peril. The insignificance and misery which had once sheltered them was gone. No one any longer could say that they were not worth killing. Even the most hideous and deformed persons were valuable if dead. Can we wonder at the panic created amongst the people of Edinburgh, a city where men had to wander through narrow, ill-lighted lanes, always, as it were, carryhig about them that fatal flO ? They could not hide their treasure away. It was they themselves.
Who then will wonder, when Burke appeared on the scaffold, that the vast crowd who waited to see him hanged rent the air with their cries of execration ? All felt that he might have been their murderer and that over their faces might have been thrown the dreadful pitch plaster with -which it was believed that he committed his crimes. There was in this new mode of death an extra terror. The dagger, the pistol, and poison seemed ways of death familiar, and therefore less frightful. The awful thought of suffocation, of the hideous struggle for breath, of the impossi- bility of getting free from such an assailant produced a dread which swept through the country like a whirlwind.
The actual story of the Burke and Hare murders and of the main trial is too well known to need abstraction here. Instead of making any attempt at a précis, we will refer to the by-products of the case and book. First we must say a word about the illustrations. They are very well selected and of great interest. One of them, strange to say, has an artistic interest of no mean order. It is a drawing made by a medical student of the unfor- tunate Mary Paterson, a girl of only eighteen, who met Burke accidentally and was drugged and murdered within a couple of hours of their acquaintance. Now, it happened that Mary Paterson was a person of extraordinary beauty, and when her body was taken and placed on the dissecting table it created what might almost be described as a delirious fascination. Who would have thought that a body of Scottish students and professional men steeped in surgical studies would in the year 1828 take immediate heed of the aesthetic situation and refuse to judge "a subject" merely from the anatomical stand- point r As a matter of fact, professors and students seem to have been immediately and greatly moved by the beauty of the poor creature stretched 911 the dissecting table. Dr. Logsdale, who was one of the students in the lecture room of Dr. Knox, makes the following very remarkable statement : " The body of the girl Paterson could not fail to attract attention by its voluptuous form and beauty ; students crowded around the table on which she lay, and artists came to study a model worthy of Phidias and the best Greek art." The drawing here reproduced, made by a medical student, Mr. J. Oliphant, completely bears out this description. Here is no coarse or frousty " conscientious nude," but a thing of beauty. Ridiculous as it may seem to readers who have not the drawing before them, we do not think that Mr. Roughead exaggerates when he says that the drawing is " curiously reminiscent in its graceful pose of the famous Rokeby Venus of Velazquez." The present writer is constrained to go further in praise of the drawing. Mr. Oliphant was probably only what would in the twenties of last century have been called " clever with his pencil." The clamant beauty of the subject seems to have inspired the draughtsman. After all, such things are not unknown. There are examples of very poor draughtsmen being moved to do things far beyond their ordinary competence by meeting a model of special beauty and attraction. What makes the -whole dreadful story more awful and more squalid is the minute account of how the unhappy inheritor of a body so beautiful was done to death in a horrible, filthy room occupied by an old hag and her husband. She was made speechlessly drunk with whisky, and as she lay across the frousty bed with its ragged and grimy hangings she was suffocated by Burke not with a pitch plaster, but merely with his hands.
Curiously enough, though the evidence would probably have been sufficient, the charge against Burke on this count was dropped. The actual trial took place on the indictment for the murder of "Daft Jamie," a half-witted beggar. Here we may note that a very striking picture of him reproduced from a contemporary print is included in the volume. Another con- temporary drawing is that of Dr. Knox lecturing. Dr. Knox, it may be remembered, was the man who was in the habit of buying bodies from Burke and using them in his dissecting room. He was not indioted, as no evidence could be brought to show that he was in any sense an accessory after the fact. He was, however, strangely callous as to how the bodies were obtained. He not only asked no questions, but must have deliberately shut his mind to any hints, however broad.
The most hideous picture in the whole blood-curdling collection is that of " the murderer Burke Drawn from Life in the Lock-up House on the day before his Execution by his own consent By Benjamin W. Crombie." We think it probable that Stevenson saw this print. It seems to tally with his famous description of Hyde. The shortness and squareness of the frame, the way the head is set on, the long arms, the dreadful eyes, and, perhaps worst of all, the short stumpy legs, all call Hyde to mind. He is just the man to have clubbed his victim to a jelly and then have jumped upon the body The minute and detailed account of how Burke met his death is curious. He showed an attitude of mind which seems hardly consistent with sanity, and yet there was nothing that could be described as actual madness in his behaviour. The night before his execution he seemed troubled by the fact that he had not received the whole of the price paid for his last victim. He wanted to secure it so that he might buy himself a more respectable pair of trousers than his own in which to be hanged ! With that desire for making things appropriate which belonged to our ancestors, the court directed that Burke's own body should be sent to a dissecting-room. The brain, we are told, was the part of the subject which was lectured upon, and was described as unusually soft.
But enough of such horrors ! The reader, when he lays down the book, may well say, "I will dance no more at the carnival of death." And yet such books as this are not without their use. When we talk of the hideous moral depravity of a section of the community, and when some of our teachers tell us that the condition of our great cities is now as bad or worse than it ever was, we can judge the value of their comments by remembering the condition of Edinburgh in 1828 as exposed at the Burke trial. We are not worse, but a great deal better.
One of the best parts of a book of this kind is the verbatim reports of the evidence. There is no better intellectual experience than following the course of a great trial and noting how difficult is the establishment of facts by human testimony, and, above all, how essential it is to the true carrying out of justice that the facts relied on should be proved in accordance
with strict rules and under strict guarantees for veracity. Justice is a very much more difficult thing to attain than some people suppose. It is not to be obtained by throwing in a heap what everybody has said or thought about the case as if was all of equal value. Of course it is possible, nay easy, to be too pedantic in the acceptance of evidence, but no one can read the report of a great trial without seeing how important it is that every bit of evidence should be duly estimated—that no more weight should be given to it than it actually possesses.
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