“Polarities within an Entity”: The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001)

McCracken-Flesher (2012), this essay will first provide a sketch of the actual facts of the case and a brief survey of relevant Burke and Hare texts. It will then discuss one recent text from the Burke and Hare corpus in more detail, Ian Rankin’s The Falls (2001); this discussion is intended to situate Rankin’s text in its literary environments, the genre of the police procedural and Scottish literature, and to explore the similarities between these two environments.

, this essay will first provide a sketch of the actual facts of the case and a brief survey of relevant Burke and Hare texts. It will then discuss one recent text from the Burke and Hare corpus in more detail, Ian Rankin's The Falls (2001); this discussion is intended to situate Rankin's text in its literary environments, the genre of the police procedural and Scottish literature, and to explore the similarities between these two environments. 4 On 1 November 1828, William Burke and William Hare, together with their partners, were arrested in Edinburgh and charged with the murder of an elderly Irishwoman, variously named Mary McGonegal, Campbell, or Docherty. Her body had been seen by neighbours in Burke's lodging house in the slums of the West Port, and was later retrieved by the authorities from the dissecting room of Dr Robert Knox, Fellow of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons, Conservator of the Museum of Comparative Anatomy and Pathology, and Lecturer in John Barclay's School of Anatomy. William Hare and his wife turned King's evidence, and upon having been promised immunity, Hare confessed to a total of sixteen murders, a number which was corroborated by William Burke after he had stood trial and been convicted. Apparently, in the Edinburgh of Burke and Hare, there was a segment of the population so destitute and rootless that, if they disappeared from the face of the earth, they would not be missed: vagrants, beggars, prostitutes, ex-soldiers, or recent immigrants from Ireland. Burke and Hare, themselves Irish immigrants, had hit upon their scheme almost by accident: when one of Hare's lodgers died owing his landlord some money, Burke and Hare decided to make him pay his debt posthumously by selling his corpse to an anatomist. Their method was simple: to select a victim, invite him or her into the lodging-house, ply them with drink, and suffocate them as this leaves no obvious mark on the body. 5 Amidst enormous public interest, Burke was put on trial before the High Court of Justiciary at Edinburgh on 24 December 1828, and formally charged with three murders: as the Docherty case was the strongest of the three, given the evidence of the body, it was heard first, and Burke was found guilty and sentenced to the gallows. He was executed on 28 January 1829, in the presence of thousands of spectators and afterwards publicly dissected by Professor Alexander Monro tertius. Those good burghers of Edinburgh who could not gain admission to the anatomy theatre and who expressed their displeasure at this by rioting were given the opportunity to view Burke's dissected body; an estimated 25,000 filed past the dissecting table. His death mask was taken by the son of Madame Tussaud and displayed in Liverpool a few weeks later. His skeleton, together with a wallet fashioned from his skin, can still be seen in what is now called the History of Surgery Museum at Edinburgh's Surgeons' Hall. 1 Monro himself allegedly kept some hair from Burke's leg, and before disposing of the cadaver, dipped his quill in Burke's blood, "recording that 'this is written with the blood of Wm Burke […] taken from his head on the 1 st of Feb. 1829'." (Quoted in Rosner 2010: 244) 6 Of the other protagonists of the story, Hare -whom the Edinburgh mob would have torn to pieces after his release from prison -was smuggled out of Edinburgh by the authorities. He was last sighted in the West of Scotland, presumably on his way home to Ireland. As to Dr Robert Knox, he was not even called as a witness at Burke's trial, which again incensed the Edinburgh mob: a few days after the execution, it congregated in front of his house and burned him in effigy. Clearly, in the public's perception, justice had not been done and the case was not yet closed. An informal "Polarities within an Entity": The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin's Th... Angles, 16 | 2023 inquest conducted by Knox's peers returned the carefully worded verdict of having acted in a "very incautious manner" (quoted in Rosner 2010: 255): the medical profession believed that, if Knox went down, he would take his colleagues with him. These may not have been guilty of acquiring their anatomical "subjects" from murderers, but their sources of supply were equally suspect. Although, in the century preceding the Burke and Hare case, anatomy had been established as one of the key medical disciplines and become central to the teaching of medicine, bodies on which anatomists could conduct research and which they could use for teaching purposes, were notoriously difficult to come by as only the bodies of murderers could be lawfully dissected. Hence, as Ruth Richardson puts it, human corpses underwent a process of "reification and commodification" (2000: 72). To some extent, the anatomists, together with their students, solved the problem by removing -"resurrecting" -freshly interred bodies from graves in local cemeteries. There, the corpses of the poor were particularly at risk: whereas wealthy families could afford double and triple coffins with zinc and lead linings, or else buried their dead in heavily fortified vaults, the bodies of the destitute, wrapped in their shrouds, were disposed of in shallow pits. 2

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Robert Knox himself, incidentally, appears to have disclaimed any responsibility as to the provenance of his specimens. Edinburgh historian Owen Dudley Edwards describes Knox's position as follows: Knox simply did not regard the Burke and Hare murders as criminal: on the contrary, he looked on them as an enlightened method of disposing of worthless derelicts with ultimate betterment to the more desirable segments of humanity by reason of the benefits conferred to the study of anatomy. (1980: 135) 3 8 According to Edwards, it is, therefore, no coincidence that Knox's book The Races of Men of 1850 became one of the foundational texts of British imperial racism. The most penetrating comment on Knox can be read in the journal of Scottish historical novelist Walter Scott, who was among the crowd of spectators at Burke's execution: [Knox] cannot have it both ways: either he had his suspicions, and failed to stop the traffic; or heprimus et incomparabilis -was so ignorant of his art as to believe that every one of them died a natural death. (1936: 93-4; italics in the original) 4

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It is because of comments such as these that Caroline McCracken-Flesher argues in her The Doctor Dissected. A Cultural Autopsy of the Burke & Hare Murders (2012) that it might have been Scott who could have told the Burke and Hare story so as to instantly integrate it into Scottish culture: however, because he chose not to "bury the tale's unpleasant parts in acceptable story" he kept "exposed the tissue of memory that (should) interconnect doctor, students, and society across the bodies lying on Doctor Knox's dissecting slabs" (2012: 46). Instead, Scott bequeathed the task of exploring the relationship between the living and the dead bodies in the dissecting room to successive generations of Scottish writers: from Alexander Leighton's The Court of Cacus; The Story of Burke and Hare and David Pae's Mary Paterson; or, the Fatal Error in the 1860s to Alasdair Gray's Poor Things in the 1990s, and from Henry Lonsdale's hagiographic A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox the Anatomist of 1871 to James Bridie's The Anatomist of 1930. Tracing the transformations which the Burke and Hare narrative has undergone in these texts since 1828, McCracken-Flesher suggests that "the story of Burke and Hare has taught Scots to privilege not just the memories by which we live, but the disruptive experiences that undermine meaning." (2012: 23) of his police procedural series featuring Edinburgh Detective Inspector John Rebus. 5 In the "Introduction" to the 2005 edition of the novel, Rankin recounts an anecdote about liaising with a French film crew at the recently opened Museum of Scotland on Chambers Street, where he is accosted by a member of staff who suggests that he go and have a look at the "little dolls". This is how he makes the acquaintance of the Arthur's Seat coffins. They are tucked away at the back of the fourth floor, in a section dedicated to religious beliefs and the afterlife. As soon as I saw them, I knew they would make a great story, especially as no one had come up with an incontrovertible interpretation of their meaning. (2005: xii) 11 The "little dolls" were discovered on the north-eastern slope of Arthur's Seat in 1836; placed in seventeen miniature coffins, which had been arranged in three tiers, they wore hand-sewn clothes, and had painted-on black boots. Of these seventeen coffins, which had initially been housed in a private collection, the eight remaining were gifted to the Museum of Scotland in 1901. What interpretations there are of their 'meaning' is rehearsed by historian and curator Jean Burchill, together with Rebus, during the latter's visit to the museum: witchcraft, good luck charms for sailors prior to sea voyages, or else surrogate, or mock, burials for the victims of Burke and Hare (Rankin 2005: 95-6). The latter theory, as Rankin explains in the "Afterword" to the 2005 edition of The Falls, has proved to be far the most likely (at any rate, the most popular): After the first draft of this book was written, I discovered that in 1999 the Museum of Scotland commissioned two American researchers, Dr Allen Simpson and Dr Sam Menefee of the University of Virginia, to examine the Arthur's Seat coffins and formulate a solution. They concluded that the most likely explanation was that the coffins had been made by a shoemaker acquaintance of murderers Burke and Hare, using a shoemaker's knife and brass fittings adapted from shoe buckles, the idea being to give the victims some vestige of Christian burial, since a dissected corpus could not be resurrected. it not been for the resurrectionists and the likes of Messrs Burke and Hare.' 'Is that why you're here? Paying homage?' (Rankin 2005: 136) 14 At this point, of course, Rebus does not yet know that Devlin's "homage" to his role models has already taken on a rather more sinister form. Devlin is the killer responsible for the deaths of the four women and has left, in his own words, the coffins as a "memento mori" for his randomly selected victims (Rankin 2005: 453), and to honour the memory of Knox and Lovell, the latter possibly another serial killer of women: "Who better", Devlin remarks, "than an anatomist to get away with murder?" (Rankin 2005: 446) When Jean Burchill, on a visit to Devlin, comes across his set of woodworking tools hidden underneath a table supposedly crafted by Lovell, Devlin very nearly murders her as well, and is, in turn, almost killed by Rebus.
15 From the perspective of the twenty-fourth Rebus novel, A Heart Full of Headstones (2022), The Falls exhibits all the features -features interrelated, and indeed, as will be shown below, mutually re-enforcing -for which the Rebus series is known. Although it is in the American hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett that setting first becomes, as Malcah Effron puts it, "the crucial component to writing reality" (2009: 330; see also Highmore 2005: 95), the protagonists of police procedurals inhabit similar, decidedly un-picturesque cityscapes; their job provides them with access to a wide range of heterogeneous sub-settings as well as to the socially and economically unequal milieus associated with them. Within their secure generic boundaries, police procedurals thus respond to real-time issues and developments not only in the protagonists' lives but also in the city and country in which they live. They can be used to convey a sense of place, especially when, as is the case for Rankin's Rebus novels, they unfold over many volumes: Simply put, 'sense of place' answers the question, what is it like. And the answer to that question includes all the physical and human characteristics of the place -the physical and human landscape, the ways in which people interact, the formal and informal institutions that structure the society, including family, church, and political and economic institutions. (Hausladen 2000: 23) 16 Rebus novels have variously highlighted environmental problems caused by the North Sea oil industry, sectarianism, police corruption and drugs and people trafficking, along the timeline of the first Scottish independence referendum of 1979, Devolution (1997), the building of the new Scottish Parliament (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004), or the G8 summit at Gleneagles (2005). As a result, these novels, in their near cartographic accuracy, evince a high degree of both spatial and temporal real-world referentiality (Anderson and Loxley 2016: 58 (2004) and Knots and Crosses (1987).
18 Like other crime fiction, then, Rankin's Rebus series is obsessed with space and time, that is, with establishing the spatio-temporal coordinates of a criminal action. While the spatial dimension of this criminal action can be pictured as a series of concentric circles, with the actual scene of crime at their centre and the culture in which it takes place as their outer periphery, its temporal configuration is axial in nature: axes, unlike vectors, are not unidirectional and, unlike bounded lines, they do not terminate at fixed points but extend beyond them, so that, from the starting-point of the actual criminal action, one needs to trace, in one direction, its pre-history (which can go far back into the past) and in the other, its post-history of detection, punishment and the restoration of social order. Additionally, correlations between the space(s) and time(s) of the text and the space(s) and time(s) of the world inevitably become intertextual in nature, as fictional characters 8 explore Edinburgh in the footsteps of their (real and fictitious) predecessors and real crimes circulate between a wide range of literary texts, predominantly from the canon of Scottish literature. The term "circulation" is used here in the sense in which Stephen Greenblatt, following Jacques Derrida, applies it in his seminal article "Towards a Poetics of Culture", namely, to describe "a powerful and effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of these domains into one another " (1989: 8). Other crimes which circulate between canonical texts are, as has already been indicated, those of Weir and Brodie. 9 Arguably, given the phenomenon of the Rebus tours, it is also "real" people who participate in the interplay between textual and "real" spaces: starting in 2000 and continually modified, the "Hidden Edinburgh" walking tour to sites associated with the Rebus novels now includes Rebus's police station, St. Leonard's, while the "Secret Edinburgh" tour also takes in the city mortuary. 19 In The Falls, Rankin's contribution to intertextual processes accumulating down the generations, is -with the exception of his re-circulation of the Burke and Hare material -slightly less obvious than in some of his other novels, but, as Devlin reminds Rebus, Lovell, the fictitious anatomist, 'was a craftsman, too. He worked with wood, as did Deacon William Brodie, of whom you will have heard.' 'Gentleman by day, housebreaker by night.' Rebus acknowledged. 'And perhaps the model for Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde. As a child, Stevenson had a wardrobe in his room, one of Brodie's creations… ' (2005: 138).  (1960) share, namely, an interest in dualities: dualities, furthermore, which they typically present in bifurcated narratives of good and evil, appearance and reality, public and private, or day and night. In the context of the Scottish literary canon, these dualities are frequently subsumed under "Polarities within an Entity": The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin's Th...

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the -notoriously controversial -term of "Caledonian antisyzygy", that is, of polarities within an entity. Coined by G. Gregory Smith as early as 1919, the term may, as Matthew Hart has suggested, still be useful for literary history once it has been stripped of its ethnonational(ist) connotations and considered as a "formal and taxonomical notion" to categorise a "tradition characterised by contrariety." (2010: 69-70) 22 However, in Rankin's novels -and in many other Edinburgh-centred texts -it is not only genre fiction and canonical Scottish literature which can be seen as interconnected, but also genre fiction and the Scottish literary canon on the one hand, and spatial and temporal real-world referentiality on the other so that, according to Anderson and Loxley, [t]he Edinburgh that might be evoked through this intertextual and referential toponymic play undoubtedly belongs amongst the sites classed by Eric Prieto as 'the hauts lieux of the literary tradition: places that have a distinct cultural and topographical profile and that have given rise to a whole body of literature.' (2016: 59) 11 23 Regarding temporal real-world referentiality, configurations of split or double identities can be found in Edinburgh's criminal histories from the original court records to twenty-first reworkings of the material. What changes across time -in a dialectic of continuity and discontinuity -are the terms in and through which duality is conceptualised. Early Thomas Weir and Deacon Brodie narratives employ, for Weir, metaphors taken from clothing -the coat which conceals the sinner's hypocrisy, the veil behind which he tries to hide from the eyes of God -while, for Brodie, the central antithesis is, for obvious reasons, between his legal day-time and illegal night-time activities. By contrast, what is emphasised in early responses to the case of Burke and Hare as it unfolds are the antitheses between more or less advanced levels of civilisation, and within the Enlightenment project of the former, between scientific progress and respect for the individual human life. To quote, once again, Walter Scott: Here is a doctor who is able to take down who is able to take down the whole clockwork of the human frame, and may in time find some way or repairing and putting it together again; and there is Burke with the body [of his] murdered countrywoman on his back, and her blood on his hands, asking his price from the learned carcass-butcher. (1936: 128; italics in the text).
24 Considering spatial real-world referentiality, these antitheses are (literally) grounded in the changing topographies of Edinburgh: until the mid-eighteenth century, their physical embodiment was the socially stratified multi-story tenement of what is now called the Old Town, with its aboveground floors open to view, and its cramped vaults out of sight (Cork 2014: 133-4 25 And yet: dualities have the unfortunate habit of collapsing into one another, in spite of the authors' best efforts to shore them up. Crime cuts across these dualities and destabilises them in the process, as when medical progress depends upon the poor, who will at least initially not profit from it, yielding up their dead bodies -bodies which are, in turn, consanguineous with those of the anatomists who dissect them. Quoting, once again, The Falls' serial killer, New Town resident Donald Devlin (who, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, has been given an Irish last name), 12  27 On 2 July 2022, a new exhibition opened at the National Museum of Scotland. Entitled Anatomy: A Matter of Life and Death, it invited its visitors to "explore the history of anatomical study, from artistic explorations by Leonardo da Vinci to the Burke and Hare Murders". As has been shown in this paper, for Edinburgh, the Burke and Hare murders are, quite literally, a matter of life and death: while Edinburgh's criminal past shapes -and its unresolved conflicts haunt -its present, any reconstruction of this past is, conversely, shaped by present concerns. Furthermore, in Edinburgh, this past is, perhaps uniquely, inscribed in its physical environment, its cityscape scarred by the traumatic events for which it provided, and continues to provide, a setting. One of the most pressing of these concerns is the quest for a stable Scottish national identity, a concept which Rankin, like many other Scottish authors past and present, interrogates by drawing on the Scottish literary canon and on traditional perceptions of Edinburgh (Heyl 2005). It is an interest in dualities which these two conventions share -and for which, in the case of Burke and Hare, they have found a perfect embodiment. Perhaps, then, every culture gets the crimes it deserves, so that, as Eva Erdmann has observed, "[t]he reading of crime novels becomes an ethnographic reading, the scene of crime becomes the locus genius of the cultural tragedy. " (2009: 19) Coda 28 When, in The Falls, Jean Burchill discovers Devlin's woodworking tools under the Lovell table, she has bent down to pick up the missing piece of an Edinburgh puzzle, which is a slightly too obvious gesture towards her role as an unofficial co-investigator. As a historian, she shares, with Rebus, a professional interest in the material traces of the past; in fact, in an earlier Rebus novel, Black and Blue of 1997, Rebus, who "lived in people's pasts", claims to have become a historian (Rankin 1997: 127). But this same professional interest is also shared by anatomists dissecting a corpse -and by crime novelists such as Rankin: intent on probing the underside (or even underbelly) of "Polarities within an Entity": The Case of Burke and Hare and Ian Rankin's Th... Angles, 16 | 2023 society and on exposing the dark skeletons beneath the flesh, their narratives range across the sites of body and city -and of the city as body.