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.
