Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, and Moveable Goods: Transformation of Edinburgh's Underworld in the Early Nineteeth Century

5. The Transformation of the Shadow Economy

        TheTransformation of the Shadow Economy “Hence old crimes have become new”1 While the story of Cain and Abel suggests that murder is as old as life, responses to the Edinburgh murders in  suggest something else. As the anonymous editor of The West Port Murders put it, the march of crime has far outstripped the “march of intellect,” and attained a monstrous, a colossal development.........Hence old crimes are become new by being attended with unknown and unheard-of concomitants; and atrocities never dreamt of or imagined before have sprung up amongst us to cover us with confusion and dismay.2 The editor went on to discuss “the regular system of murder” that was “organised” by Burke, Hare, Log, and M’Dougal, finally calling it “wholly without example.” One suspects that, coming on the first page of a hurriedly written popular tract, this was no great insight, but a reflection of one aspect of common discussion in early . The murders forced many people to connect three disparate phenomena : the bleakest sort of bloody crime, the study of anatomy in the tradition of Enlightenment empiricism, and the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s marketplace, the law of supply and demand.3  The Not-So-Invisible Hand To see the invisible hand suddenly figured as the hands of William Burke or William Hare was enough to strike fear into the minds of people who saw themselves reduced to the status of objects in a market , with a price on their heads. Rumors had surrounded the teaching of anatomy for a hundred years at least, but fear of the resurrectionist ’s spade was a far cry from outright murder. And so the working poor and the respectable artisans of Edinburgh had responded to the news of Burke, Hare, Log, M’Dougal, and Knox with anger and fear, rooted in their knowledge of just whose bodies were turning up on anatomists’ tables: beggars, peddlers, prostitutes, pensioned soldiers, washerwomen, laborers. Nor could they be fooled into thinking those bodies were the result of bad character on the part of the murderers, when it was apparent that the renowned Dr. Knox’s money and the Edinburgh medical establishment underpinned the system. What the Edinburgh and, for that matter, London anatomists had done was to create a market for fresh human bodies, thereby commodifying the body in a way that horribly outreached the excesses that Marx would later catalog for the sale of the body’s labor power. Knox, Burke, and Hare, and for that matter M’Dougal and Log, laid bare an embarrassing facet, not of the markets but of the new, and increasingly capitalist , society. This had become powerful enough in Scotland by  to begin to dissolve the social ties and institutions—religious, communal , political—which might have impeded this new, exceptionally pragmatic business in theWest Port.4 But the developing market in bodies, which appeared to the wellknown radical publisher Richard Cobbett as an unwelcome entrepreneurial response to demand, was also interpreted as the result of anachronistic regulation by state and church, which kept the legal supply of bodies ruinously short. Progressive middle-class men preferred to see the murders as the predictable outgrowth of unwieldy early modern regulation, rather than see an entrepreneur at work in the underworld, which was extraordinarily free by its very nature. The Transformation of the Shadow Economy  They looked to reformed laws and attitudes to free individuals from both legal and traditional attachments to the rituals of death.5 But no such rational, reformed, or Benthamite legal solution emerged immediately. Lord Warburton’s Anatomy Act of  still preyed on the poor for something as yet distasteful to middle-class men—leaving their bodies to science would come later—and unthinkable for middle-class women. ButWarburton’s Act was an effective solution that ended the murders and the grave-robbing by offering the bodies of paupers to science. In the same year Jeremy Bentham, the purposeful Utilitarian, left his body for dissection, after which it was reconstructed from his skeleton by workers from Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, and left in permanent public view in London. Bentham, attempting to be useful and unsentimental, erred. His bizarre display, which ultimately more closely resembled the mummification of a pharaoh than a selfless act in the name of science, probably repelled more than it attracted to his cause.6 Burke’s Skeleton Burke was dissected, then skinned, and...