A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

that still sells many Sunday newspapers. The New Newgate Calendar adopts an almost breathless
tone: ‘The murder for which this most diabolical criminal merited and justly underwent condign
punishment, rivalled in cold-blooded atrocity that of the unfortunate Mr Weare, and was as foul and
dark a crime as ever stained the annals of public justice.’ Then it goes on to describe what a
beautiful and ‘superior’ young lady Maria was. In short, it has little or no relation to the actuality -
a sluttish countrygirl of loose morals and a weak young man of criminal tendencies. But it was the
story everybody wanted to believe, just as they wanted to believe that the ‘unfortunate Mr Weare’
was a respectable businessman who had been lured to his death by two monsters.
What has happened is quite simple. It is a question of two distinct forms of ‘alienation’; alienation
by the new world of industry, with its dreariness and impersonality, and alienation by the novel,
which has now become a kind of fairy story, with only the most tenuous links with reality. The first
‘Gothic’ thriller, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, had appeared in 1765, a mere five years after
Rousseau’s New Héloise, and from then on, the struggle was on to see who could invent the most
blood-chilling and preposterous story. In 1795, Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho headed the
field, to be eclipsed a year later by Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk, that had everything from
murder and demonology to rape. The Gothic romance had to be set in an old castle, and be full of
ghosts and hints of monstrous cruelty - early Hollywood films such as Frankenstein and Dracula
took over the medium and surpassed it. In 1820, the Rev Charles Maturin produced his Melmoth
the Wanderer, which, as Everyman’s Dictionary of Literary Biography remarks, ‘outdoes his
models in the mysterious, the horrible, and indeed, the revolting.’ By 1840, these horror stories had
become so popular that publishers issued them in weekly parts, the ‘penny dreadful’, and tales such
as Rymer’s Varney the Vampire petrified readers from Land’s End to John o’ Groats. (In America
they were called ‘dime novels’.)
And this, combined with the sheer boredom of the ten or twelve hour day in factories, explains why
the murder of William Weare and Maria Marten aroused a morbid excitement out of all proportion
to the facts of the case. The world had become ‘unrealistic’. Defoe had written with plodding
realism, like a newspaper report; the scribe of the mid-nineteenth century had to talk breathlessly
about ‘diabolical criminals’ and ‘cold-blooded atrocities’ to produce any impression on an audience
fed daily on gore and cruelty.
But at least cases like this made the British public aware of the need for a real national police force,
instead of local parish constables. And the trial that, more than any other, brought this home to even
the most anti-authoritarian liberals was that of the Edinburgh body-snatchers, Burke and Hare.
These two Irish labourers met in 1826, and moved into a ‘beggars’ hotel’ in Tanner’s Close,
Edinburgh, together with their common-law wives. Somehow, Hare succeeded in taking over the
house when its owner died. And when a tenant called Old Donald died owing his rent, Hare
decided to recover the money by selling his corpse to the medical school. The dissection of bodies
was forbidden by law; so when someone offered the medical schools a corpse - usually stolen from
a newly-dug grave - no one asked any questions. Dr Knox, of 10 Surgeon’s Square, paid Hare
£7.10s for the corpse, which was more than twice what Old Donald owed. It struck Burke and Hare
that this was an easy way of making a living - if only they could come by enough corpses. But
graveyards were usually guarded to prevent the theft of bodies. The solution seemed to be to
‘make’ corpses. So when a tenant called Joe the Mumper fell ill, Burke and Hare hastened his end
by pressing a pillow over his face. The ten pounds they received for his body convinced them that
they had stumbled upon a more profitable occupation than labouring.