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
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
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