The history of the London Burkers ; containing a faithful and authentic account of the horrid acts of the noted Resurrectionists, Bishop, Williams, May, etc., etc., and their trial and condemnation at the Old Bailey for the wilful murder of Carlo Ferrari, with the criminals' confessions after trial. Including also the life, character, and behaviour of the atrocious Eliza Ross. The murderer of Mrs. Walsh, etc., etc.

Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of the London Burkers ; containing a faithful and authentic account of the horrid acts of the noted Resurrectionists, Bishop, Williams, May, etc., etc., and their trial and condemnation at the Old Bailey for the wilful murder of Carlo Ferrari, with the criminals' confessions after trial. Including also the life, character, and behaviour of the atrocious Eliza Ross. The murderer of Mrs. Walsh, etc., etc. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cated and the ignorant who are the perpetrators of the greatest crimes, our daily experience flatly con- tradicts it. May was by no means an uneducated man. And if we take a still further retrospective view, and investigate the character and condition of Burke, we are led still more decidedly to adhere to the opinion that the quantum of crime does not de- pend upon the extent or the deficiency of education. In fact, such is the strong tendency of mankind to revolt from the idea of such unnatural enormities being committed in aught of human shape, that when the system of traffic which had been practised by Burke and his associates first flashed in full dis- closure on men’s understandings, not a few were inclined to search, in some extenuating circumstances of this kind, for a cause of palliation of this unparal- leled wretch’s iniquity. It was at least not an impossible supposition that the wretched man might have been labouring under a total insensibility of moral and even of intellectual feeling, arising from an entire want of education, from a mind dull and inert in its perceptions, originally, and not only in after life allowed to lie waste, but rendered still more callous and impassive every day by a constant contact with scenes of infamy. Could we, indeed, imagine that Burke had been left to have his cha- racter formed under an accumulation of influences fatal and awful to contemplate as these are,—that his life had been always spent in profligate habits and dissolute haunts,—that he had been born with a ferocious and indocile nature, and bred in situations which barred all progressive movements to good,— that, in short, he never had any ideas poured into his intellect, or any human feelings generated in his bosom,*—then, perhaps, it might furnish matter of curious investigation to the metaphysician, whether he were not, after all, a case which called for deep