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Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, And Moveable Goods: Transformation Of Edinburgh's Underworld In The Early Nineteeth Century, Deborah A. Symonds

University of Akron Press Publications

The year 1828, when William Burke, William Hare, and their wives murdered nearly a score of Edinburgh’s poor and sold their bodies, is a time when entrepreneurial criminals in Edinburgh’s Old Town flourished. 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 means of earning a living. Laborers and immigrants struggled to make a few pennies, and …