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Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, and Moveable Goods The Transformation of Edinburgh's Underworld in the Early Nineteenth Century by Deborah A. Symonds
167 pp., 6 x 9
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The year 1828, when
William Burke, William Hare, and their wives murdered nearly a score of
Edinburgh’s poor and sold their bodies, offers us many more
examples of entrepreneurial criminals in Edinburgh’s Old Town.
Young thieves ransacked a warehouse for tea, women pretending to be
prostitutes lifted gentlemen’s watches, and fine linens
disappeared from washerwomen’s houses. What Symonds reveals is a
shadow economy where the most numerous of all criminals and thieves
practice their trade not out of poverty and misery, but because it is
their trade. And Symonds, a pragmatic Marxist who here sides with the
poor and middling ranks who were the usual victims of most theft,
argues that the trade of thievery, far from being either static or a
symptom of misery and sign of revolt, was a very lively economic
sector, the freest market of all, and one that shifted and shadowed the
larger legitimate economy. In Edinburgh’s Old Town, a warren of
tenements and alleys, more was afoot than the murdering business of
Burke and Hare, and Lucky Log and Nelly M’Dougal. The community
of laborers and immigrants struggled to make a few pennies, and some
chose to prey on others to do so. Petty fiddles, especially of visitors
like drovers, might be tolerated, if done cleverly, but murder and
theft, especially from local business, was more valued because it could
easily substitute for capital in the shadow economy. I think that [Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, & Moveable Goods] incorporates the best of the extant work in the Weld and raises interesting questions about how crime is tolerated in poor communities and the collective reaction to deviance, community policing, and social justice. —Linda Mahood, Associate Professor, University of Guelph |
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Deborah A. Symonds is an Associate Professor of History at Drake University. She has a Bachelors of Art in English Literature and European History from Bennington College, a Masters of Letters for Scottish Literature from The University of Edinburgh, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in European and American Women’s History from Binghamton University. Her previous works include Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland. |
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