Owen Dudley Edwards
(Mercat Press, £9.95)
This is the second edition of Owen Dudley Edwards’ compelling account of the lives of the infamous Irishmen accused of supplying involuntary donors for the anatomist’s table. The author’s note dryly observes that ‘he too is an Irish Catholic making a contribution to higher learning in Edinburgh’. One might very well draw an analogy between the trade of Burke and Hare and the practice of the historian whose work in the archives earned him a Life Membership of the Royal Medical Society. Resurrected with a new introduction, the book is prefaced with an apology by de Valera addressed to a leader of the Scottish National Party: ‘I regret that we have not sent the best of our citizens to your country’.
Edwards points out that ‘Burke and Hare came to Scotland in response to the call of the industrial revolution’, and both worked on the Union Canal which linked Falkirk and Edinburgh between 1818 and 1822. In the wake of the canal’s completion, the navvies, having contributed to industrial progress, enlisted in the service of science. If they could no longer make a living, then they would make a killing. While the dust jacket alludes to ‘poor Irish immigrants’ who ‘resorted to murder as a money-making enterprise’, Edwards insists at the outset that the Irishness of Burke and Hare was immaterial at the time of Burke’s execution in 1829, since ‘neither the Edinburgh mob nor the Edinburgh polite world had any particular desire to shuffle the horror away from Edinburgh to alien scapegoats’. He goes on to say that ‘despite Burke and Hare’s Catholicism, anti-Catholic sentiment played no part in the affair or its repercussions.’ But the book closes with a comment on Burke’s last days that does not quite square with those earlier assertions: ‘Both as an Irish Catholic and as a wholesale murderer he must have been an alien figure to his guards’. We are told that within the ranks of the canal work-force ‘religion fed flames of conflict’.
Edwards points out that Burke’s intelligence and literacy ‘was frightening to Sir Walter Scott and others’. What was an intelligent, literate man doing digging ditches and carting corpses? Edwards remarks at one point that ‘wholesale murderers…are, one trusts, not particularly representative or the Irish immigrants in nineteenth-century Scotland’. The tragedy is that the part played by Irish immigrants in the industrialisation of Scotland — building canals, roads, and railways — is rarely acknowledged in Scottish histories, and Irish historians, for the best of reasons, are tasked with the exculpation of those such as Burke and Hare who are stereotypes and scapegoats rather than representatives. Any impoverished group excluded from intellectual labour will throw up violent members. Sensationalist journalism is not concerned with the working lives of ordinary Irish men and women.
Edwards writes in a wonderfully engaging style, argues with authority and insight, and has an incurable propensity for puns. In addition he reflects that ‘privatisation of public health and perpetuation of private wealth could combine to ensure what the crowds of 1829-31 feared, the murder of the poor for the cure of the rich’. Edwards suggests that ‘our own exploitation of one another makes Burkes and Hares of us all. On this logic William Burke is clearly our superior. He paid the price for doing so. Most of us have not’.
In an epigraph to the moving final chapter, ‘The Damnation of Burke’, the author indicates that the term ‘Burke’ has entered the English language with two meanings. The first is: ‘to kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or in order to sell the victim’s body for dissection, as Burke did’. The second, later meaning is ‘to smother, hush up’. The myth of Burke and Hare is that it was an aberration, and that their Irishness was inconsequential. The word ‘hare’ means ‘to run’, but also refers to one who lays the scent for the hounds in a paper chase. In resolving to treat his subjects ‘as being humans rather than monsters’ Edwards has proved that the story of Burke and Hare, for too long a source of morbid fascination for short story writers, lovers of the supernatural, and those of a morbid disposition, can be treated with sensitivity and scholarship as a crucial piece of social history. But by underplaying the Irishness and Catholicism of his eponymous anti-heroes, he, too, can be seen to ‘burke’ and ‘hare’.
Willy Maley