Notorious murders, black lanterns, & moveable goods: the transformation of Edinburgh's underworld in the early nineteenth century, by Symonds, D. A., Series on International Political and Economic History, University of Akron Press: Akron, OH; 2006, xiv+180pp., USD 39.95 (cloth).
✍ Scribed by William F. Shughart II
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 64 KB
- Volume
- 28
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0143-6570
- DOI
- 10.1002/mde.1363
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Burke's the butcher, Hare's the thief And Knox the boy who buys the beef This is a book about entrepreneurship and incomplete markets, or at least that is how an economist would read it. Written by an associate professor of history at Drake University, who is described on the dust jacket as a 'pragmatic Marxist', Notorious Murders, Black Lanterns, & Moveable Goods offers a fascinating look at the underbelly of the city whose vibrant intellectual life, peopled by men such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, Robert Burns and Walter Scott, transformed Edinburgh from an isolated backwater into the center of the Scottish Enlightenment. Deborah Symonds's story focuses, not on Edinburgh's creative heyday in the 18th century, a place and time James Buchan ( 2003) already has portrayed masterfully, but on 1828, a year that ended with the sensational murder trial of William Burke and Helen M'Dougal. Although they had been indicted on a single count, eyewitness testimony, newspaper accounts, Burke's own post-conviction confession and other records