The hideous crimes perpetrated by Burke and Hare, to which slight reference has already been made, took place about the year 1828, and the memory of those crimes was still fresh in the mind of the public when we opened in Baker Street; indeed, a matter of six years could not suffice for its obliteration.
The appalling revelation that it was not only possible, but easy, for one’s neighbour to be decoyed away, put to death, and his body sold, without question, for a sum varying from £8 to £14, aroused a feeling of consternation throughout the country of a very real and lasting character.
The high prices paid for bodies required for dissection had begotten this terrible traffic. At least sixteen murders had been traced to these miscreants, but the evidence at the trial failed to answer the question “How many more?”
Burke was executed in January, 1829, on the strength of Hare’s evidence, so that for nearly a century have the portrait-models of these two notorious criminals stood facing each other. There are to this day many visitors who, on catching sight of their forbidding features, seem to recognise them, and make ready comment, without the aid of a Catalogue, on the leading circumstances associated with their nefarious careers.
BURKE AND HARE
Both notorious criminals who perpetrated a series of gruesome murders in Scotland before 1828. These models from life by Madame Tussaud were among the first of contemporary criminals made by her for the famous “Chamber of Horrors,” then called the “Dead Room” or the “Black Room.”
The very first startling event that furnished a subject for the “Dead Room,” when the Exhibition opened in Baker Street in 1835, was the attempt on the life of Louis Philippe, King of the French, four months later.
It had been the custom of His Majesty to review the Gardes Nationales and the garrison of Paris on each anniversary of the Revolution of 1830. For some considerable time the King and his Government had been growing very unpopular, and many warnings had been given him to desist from this military function; but, in spite of all advice, he persisted in holding the review.
The anniversary of the Revolution was on the 28th of July, and the King, followed by a numerous Staff, left the Tuileries at half-past ten on the morning of that day, accompanied by his three sons, the Ducs d’Orléans, de Nemour, and de Joinville.