The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh's Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes

Chapter Six: The Dangerous Classes

Chapter 6 The Dangerous Classes Elizabeth Haldane, Margaret Haldane Some time during the spring of 1828, “a stout old woman,” Elizabeth Haldane, turned up at Margaret Hare’s lodging house in Tanner’s Close. According to Burke, she “had but one tooth in her mouth, and that was a very large one in front.” Thomas Ireland’s West Port Murders —where she is referred to as “Mary” Haldane—described her as “a dissipated character, who used to infest the Grassmarket and neighbourhood ,” but Burke claimed he knew “nothing farther of her” than her name when he found her “asleep among some straw” in Hare’s stable. “She had got some drink at the time,” Burke said, “and got more to intoxicate her,” and he and Hare suffocated her.They kept her in the stable overnight, “and took her to Dr. Knox’s next day.” Margaret (or Peggy) Haldane, one of Elizabeth’s daughters, was murdered several months later,during the summer of 1828.She,too,had lodged with Margaret Hare, and like her mother, Burke said, was “of idle habits, and much given to drinking.” Burke murdered her on his own, without the help of Hare. He and M’Dougal had moved away from Tanner’s Close, and he may have encountered Haldane on the street or, as with other victims, at a whiskey shop. In fictional re-creations of the scene, she has been depicted looking for her mother, but though this has proved an ever-attractive plot twist Burke said nothing about it. Strictly speaking Peggy Haldane was not burked. Instead, she drank a great deal, Burke explained, and then lay The Dangerous Classes 127 on the bed “with her face downwards.” He “pressed her down, and she was soon suffocated.” Indeed, she “was so drunk at the time that he thinks she was not sensible of her death, as she made no resistance whatever.” She, like Mary Paterson, was taken to “Dr. Knox’s in the afternoon in a teabox ”—that is, again within a few hours—“and £8 got for her.” Her cadaver apparently aroused no comment, though it was the second young woman to turn up dead with no obvious signs of disease. It was probably rumors about Peggy Haldane which fed the stories later associated with Mary Paterson. Haldane may well have known Burke previously, from lodging with Margaret Hare. In addition, the description of Peggy in West Port Murders as “a woman of the town” who “led a very dissolute life” is supported by police records, which show that Margaret Haldane, unlike Mary Paterson, had a criminal record. Haldane had been arrested twice in eight months for “vagrancy” and “infesting the New Town to the great annoyance of Passengers.” Thirteen other women, aged nineteen to twenty-seven, some with prior convictions, were arrested at the same time on similar charges. And so with the Haldanes’ murders we enter the world of “the dangerous classes,” as the lawyer and social theorist Jeliger Symons was to call them in mid-century, consisting of “criminals, paupers and persons whose conduct is obnoxious to the interests of society ,” as well as “that proximate body of people who are within reach of its contagion, and continually swell its number.” We enter, in other words, the criminal underworld, so intriguing to readers of the Newgate Calendar, of Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, so intractable a problem to social reformers. Symons and like-minded writers believed that criminality was on the rise, threatening all civil society. He was not concerned with what he termed “crimes of passion and poverty”—crimes committed by amateurs, as we may think of them—which he viewed as comprising a small proportion of the total criminal element. His main targets were the professional criminals, “offshoots of an extent of moral disease which they by no means accurately measure, but of which they attest the magnitude.” He was particularly concerned with theft, “a craft,” he wrote, carried on by “an organised corruption of young persons and servants.” It was “out of all proportion the most extensive crime,” and it was “gregarious”—that is, involving numbers of perpetrators, from gangs of thieves to their “resetters” or fences. It was, he pointed out with great concern, “especially adapted to 128 Chapter 6 children.” Symons was also concerned with vagrancy, as the chief means by which crime spread from place to place. Men and women “experienced in...