At Home - Bill Bryson [184]
Graveyards also improved their security, employing armed night-watchmen. That severely elevated the risk of being apprehended and beaten, so some resurrection men, as they were popularly known, turned to murder as safer. The most notorious and devoted were William Burke and William Hare, Irish immigrants in Edinburgh, who killed at least fifteen people in a period of less than a year, beginning in November 1827. Their method was crudely effective. They befriended sad wastrels, got them drunk, and suffocated them, the stout Burke sitting on the victim’s chest and Hare covering the mouth. The bodies were taken at once to Professor Robert Knox, who paid from £7 to £14 for each fresh, pink corpse. Knox must have known that something exceedingly dubious was going on—two Irish alcoholics turning up with a succession of extremely fresh bodies, each having expired in seemingly tranquil fashion—but maintained that it was not his business to ask questions. He was widely condemned for his part in the affair, but never charged or penalized. Hare escaped hanging by turning king’s evidence and offering to testify against his friend and partner. This proved unnecessary, as Burke made a full confession and was swiftly hanged. His body was delivered to another anatomy school for dissection, and pieces of his skin were pickled and for years handed out as keepsakes to favored visitors.
Hare spent only a couple of months in prison before being released, though his fate was not a happy one. He took a job at a lime kiln, where his co-workers recognized him and thrust his face into a heap of quicklime, permanently blinding him. He is thought to have spent his last years as a wandering beggar. Some reports had him returning to Ireland, others place him in America, but how long he lived and where he was buried are unknown.
All this gave a great spur to an alternative way of disposing of bodies that was surprisingly controversial in the nineteenth century: cremation. The cremation movement had nothing to do with religion or spirituality. It was all about creating a practical way to get rid of a lot of bodies in a clean, efficient, and nonpolluting manner. Sir Henry Thompson, founder of the Cremation Society of England, demonstrated the efficacy of his ovens by cremating a horse at Woking in 1874. The demonstration worked perfectly but caused an outcry among those emotionally opposed to the idea of burning a horse or any other animal. In Dorset a certain Captain Hanham built his own crematorium and used it very efficiently to dispose of his wife and mother in defiance of the laws. Others, fearful of arrest, sent their loved ones to countries where cremation was legal. Charles Wentworth Dilke, the writer and politician who was one of the cofounders of Gardener’s Chronicle with Joseph Paxton, shipped his late wife to Dresden to be cremated in 1874 after she died in childbirth. Another early exponent was Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, one of the nineteenth century’s leading archaeologists, who not only desired cremation for himself but insisted upon it for his wife, despite her continued objections. “Damn it, woman, you shall burn,” he declared to her whenever she raised the matter. Pitt Rivers died in 1900 and was cremated, even though it wasn’t yet legal. His wife outlived him, however, and was given the peaceful burial she had always longed for.
In Britain, on the whole, opposition remained entrenched for a long time. Many people thought the willful destruction of a corpse immoral. Others cited practical considerations. A point made often by opponents was that it would destroy evidence in cases of murder. The movement also wasn’t helped by the fact that one of its principal proponents was essentially mad. His name was William Price.