Corder was arrested and hanged – it was an open-and-shut case. His defence – that Maria had committed suicide during a quarrel – deceived no one. Before being hanged, in August 1828, he confessed to murdering Maria Marten.
A book and a play about the murder became instantly popular, and remained so into the twentieth century. Why? Men who killed their pregnant mistresses or wives were by no means uncommon. What thrilled the British public was the piquant mixture of sex and wickedness – the combination 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.
In February 1828, a female vagrant named Abigail Simpson was lured to the house and made drunk. On this first occasion, Burke and Hare lost their nerve, and she was still alive the next morning. But they got her drunk again, and Hare suffocated her, while Burke held her legs. Again, the corpse was sold for ten pounds. And over the next eight months, they despatched eleven more victims by the same method. Some of the victims were never identified – like an Irish beggar woman and her dumb grandson; Burke strangled her and broke the boy’s back over his knee. Dr Knox probably became suspicious when he was offered the body of an attractive little prostitute named Mary Paterson and one of his students recognised her as someone he had patronised. His suspicions must have become a certainty when Burke and Hare sold him the body of a well-known idiot called Daft Jamie, but he preferred to keep quiet.
The downfall of Burke and Hare came through carelessness; they left the corpse of a widow named Docherty in the house while they went out, and two of their lodgers located it. On their way to the police, they were met by Burke’s common-law wife, who saw from their faces that something was wrong and fell on her knees to beg them to keep quiet. The tenants allowed themselves to be persuaded over several glasses of whisky in a pub, but finally went to the police anyway. A search of the house in Tanner’s Close revealed bloodstained clothing. Hare quickly turned king’s evidence and was not tried. Burke was sentenced to death, and hanged in January 1829. Hare left Edinburgh, and died, an old blind beggar, in London.
This was by far the most gruesome case in British criminal history; yet it was perhaps a little too horrifying for the British public, which preferred tales in which beautiful girls were seduced. So the case of Burke and Hare never achieved the same widespread popularity as the Red Barn murder, or the case of Ellie Hanley, the ‘Colleen Bawn’ (‘white girl’), a pretty Irish girl who had been married and then murdered by a young rake in 1819. But it undoubtedly helped to reconcile the British public to the first appearance of the British bobby (so called after the founder of the force, Sir Robert Peel) in September 1829. The new police were told to be firm but conciliatory, respectful, quiet and determined, and to maintain a perfectly even temper. They followed these instructions to the letter, with the result that the public gradually lost its distrust of its new guardians.
But it took some time. During these early years, the major problem for the British bobby was simply that he wore uniform and looked ‘official’. This tended to arouse automatic resentment in the slums of England’s major cities. In June 1830, Police Constable Grantham saw two drunken Irishmen quarrelling over a woman in Somers Town, north London, and when he tried to separate them was knocked to the ground and kicked in the face with heavy boots. He died soon afterwards, the first British policeman to die in the execution of his duty; the murderers walked away and were never caught. Six weeks later, a policeman named John Long became convinced that three suspicious-looking characters in London’s Gray’s Inn Road were contemplating burglary, and accosted them. Two of them grabbed him by the arms and one stabbed him in the chest. There was a hue and cry, and another policeman who came on the scene caught a man who was running away. He proved to be a baker called John Smith, who had a wife and six children, and he protested that he had heard a cry of ‘Stop thief and joined in the chase. His story was disbelieved and he was hanged a few days later. Under the circumstances, it seems likely he was innocent, and that the early police felt it was better to hang an innocent man than no one at all.
In 1833, the murder of another policeman revealed that the English attitude towards authority remained ambivalent. A mildly revolutionary group called the National Political Union called a meeting in Coldbath Fields, which was promptly banned by the police commissioner. The ban was ignored, and a crowd gathered around a speaker on a soap box. Eight hundred policemen and troops looked on suspiciously. A police spy slipped away from the crowd to report that sedition was being preached, and the man in charge of the police ordered his men to advance slowly, their truncheons at the ready. The crowd booed and pelted them with stones; the police got angry and began hitting out wildly, knocking down women and children as well as men. A man drew a knife as a policeman tried to capture an anarchist banner, and stabbed him in the chest. Police Constable Robert Culley staggered a few yards and fell dead.