ROUGHEAD, William (editor). Burke and Hare. Glasgow and Edinburgh: William Hodge & Company Ltd. 1921.
8vo. Original tan cloth, gilt lettering and double-ruling to spine, publisher’s device blind-stamped to front board, top edge gilt, other edges untrimmed; pp. [12], 412, with photographic frontispiece and 12 photographic plates; light rubbing to extremities, slight spine lean, light off-setting from pastedowns to endpapers, otherwise a near-fine copy; ownership signature in pencil to front free endpaper.
First limited edition, one of 200 numbered copies, of William Roughead’s definitive account of the infamous Edinburgh body snatchers, Burke and Hare.
William Roughead (1870-1952), an Edinburgh lawyer and chronicler of British criminal trials, began his career in true-crime literature in 1906. Encouraged by Harry Hodge, head of the legal publishing house William Hodge & Co., Roughead launched the influential Notable Scottish Trials series with The Trial of Dr. Pritchard, documenting Glasgow’s last public execution. The format, featuring a factual trial transcript accompanied by an analytical introduction, became the hallmark of the series, appealing to both legal professionals and true-crime enthusiasts throughout the English-speaking world.
Roughead went on to edit nine further volumes in the Notable Scottish Trials series, as well as contributions to the Notable English Trials (later combined as the Notable British Trials from 1915). His editorial work covered landmark cases, including Deacon Brodie (1788), Captain Porteous (1736), Oscar Slater (1909), Mrs. McLachlan (1862, his personal favourite), Mary Blandy (1752), Burke and Hare (1828), Katherine Nairn (1765), John Donald Merrett (1927), and John Watson Laurie (1889).
The Burke and Hare murders were a series of sixteen murders carried out over ten months in 1828 in Edinburgh. The perpetrators, William Burke and William Hare, sold the corpses of their victims to Dr. Robert Knox (1791-1862), a prominent anatomist, for use in his dissection lectures.
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