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paulcowdell's review
4.0
I think 3.5 for this often quite brilliant book. It's a serious and wide-ranging history, that does an impressive job of trying to give a complete and complex context to Burke and Hare's murders. It's probably at its best in the early chapters, placing the Irish migrant workers in their full historical, social, religious, economic context back in Ireland, in the military, on the canals, and in the communities where they settled. His advocacy and sympathy for Burke are illuminating and informed.
The book's problems, however, also stem from that same comprehensiveness. One of Edwards's aims is to dismantle the fictions and misinformation that have grown over the case like mould. He does an excellent job with explaining the reasons for some of this, not least in outlining what has gone missing from the record and why.
Unfortunately, though, this involves tackling the inelegant misrepresentations and skirting around clarity that formed so much of the court case. Because so many variant accounts of the murders - both those discussed in court and those deliberately suppressed from that discussion - circulated and proliferated from the very start, Edwards does not have the option of presenting a single received version of the story and then dismantling it item by item. His slightly clumsy choice, therefore, is not even to attempt this but to take (some) individual murders as they come into view during the proceedings. Thus, Daft Jamie's murder (excluded from the court's consideration) turns up in a chapter looking at the economics of immigrant life, while the conflicting accounts of Mary Docherty's murder - and, perhaps just as importantly, the interactions with the anatomists - are reserved for the lengthy examination of Burke's trial.
This is comprehensible, although it hardly makes the book easier to read. Where it becomes particularly difficult, however, is in Edwards's often fruitily rich prose style, with its echoes of some of the great moralising nineteenth-century historians (discussed well here). This is all well and good, and indeed eminently readable, when outlining the broad sweep background to the murderers' lives ('The three great events in the history of Western Europe since the birth of Christ were the Roman Empire, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, and Ireland missed them all'). It's much less successful in the fine details of the trial and the disputes that lay behind them. This is compounded by the adoption of a weirdly rhetorical style that is really unsatisfactory, with the court proceedings related in somewhat compressed legalese, followed by parentheses of arch observations presented almost as asides. The broader arguments are almost hidden at times in the density of the presentation.
The oratorical richness of the prose leaves no doubt that Edwards would be an utterly compelling lecturer on this topic, but it doesn't work quite so well on the page. Not least of the problems is that although everything is meticulously researched, he gives no direct references eg footnotes. This may not be a problem in a work of popular history, but it makes it difficult to follow some of the bold assertions. (He's particularly cavalier in his universalised references to 'the ballads' without any specific mentions). It also gives his strident and repeated defence of Helen MacDougal something of an impassioned summation to the jury rather than a documented argument.
That all becomes a little more baffling here in this third edition, where the final chapter /does/ contain specifically referenced quotations, usually from literary sources: this, it turns out, covers new material published since the previous edition, as he has left the invaluable 'Note on Sources' - which follows that last chapter - unchanged from that previous publication.
It's a little frustrating, because this is in so many ways the essential book on the subject, but the reader may well feel that they now have to go and read some of the inessential books on the subject to get a better handle on the arguments here.
The book's problems, however, also stem from that same comprehensiveness. One of Edwards's aims is to dismantle the fictions and misinformation that have grown over the case like mould. He does an excellent job with explaining the reasons for some of this, not least in outlining what has gone missing from the record and why.
Unfortunately, though, this involves tackling the inelegant misrepresentations and skirting around clarity that formed so much of the court case. Because so many variant accounts of the murders - both those discussed in court and those deliberately suppressed from that discussion - circulated and proliferated from the very start, Edwards does not have the option of presenting a single received version of the story and then dismantling it item by item. His slightly clumsy choice, therefore, is not even to attempt this but to take (some) individual murders as they come into view during the proceedings. Thus, Daft Jamie's murder (excluded from the court's consideration) turns up in a chapter looking at the economics of immigrant life, while the conflicting accounts of Mary Docherty's murder - and, perhaps just as importantly, the interactions with the anatomists - are reserved for the lengthy examination of Burke's trial.
This is comprehensible, although it hardly makes the book easier to read. Where it becomes particularly difficult, however, is in Edwards's often fruitily rich prose style, with its echoes of some of the great moralising nineteenth-century historians (discussed well here). This is all well and good, and indeed eminently readable, when outlining the broad sweep background to the murderers' lives ('The three great events in the history of Western Europe since the birth of Christ were the Roman Empire, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, and Ireland missed them all'). It's much less successful in the fine details of the trial and the disputes that lay behind them. This is compounded by the adoption of a weirdly rhetorical style that is really unsatisfactory, with the court proceedings related in somewhat compressed legalese, followed by parentheses of arch observations presented almost as asides. The broader arguments are almost hidden at times in the density of the presentation.
The oratorical richness of the prose leaves no doubt that Edwards would be an utterly compelling lecturer on this topic, but it doesn't work quite so well on the page. Not least of the problems is that although everything is meticulously researched, he gives no direct references eg footnotes. This may not be a problem in a work of popular history, but it makes it difficult to follow some of the bold assertions. (He's particularly cavalier in his universalised references to 'the ballads' without any specific mentions). It also gives his strident and repeated defence of Helen MacDougal something of an impassioned summation to the jury rather than a documented argument.
That all becomes a little more baffling here in this third edition, where the final chapter /does/ contain specifically referenced quotations, usually from literary sources: this, it turns out, covers new material published since the previous edition, as he has left the invaluable 'Note on Sources' - which follows that last chapter - unchanged from that previous publication.
It's a little frustrating, because this is in so many ways the essential book on the subject, but the reader may well feel that they now have to go and read some of the inessential books on the subject to get a better handle on the arguments here.
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