About

This project was created by Marry Ann Orfanos, a first-year English Master’s student at Boston College. Part of the impetus for this project was to fulfill a Digital Humanities Capstone requirement (with many thanks to helpful instructors!), and it was created during the spring semester of 2024.

This project is an annotated description of three contemporaneous primary sources: two joint documents published in a historical newspaper, the third a series of correspondence published in an esteemed medical and surgical journal. I initially transcribed the original documents and incorporated annotations via TEI, before later converting the original XML files into HTML format to be embedded into this website. This website was created using both CSS (primarily for interactive and visual elements) and HTML (to display information encoded in TEI and content descriptions) in tandem to construct something of an exhibit for people to explore and partake in my research.

In the course of my initial research, I noticed a sense of opacity with regard to the problem of the Burke and Hare murders as well as Knox’s facilitation of their egregious crimes. Rather than being virtually unknown, this historical event was endlessly cited in the larger context of the surgical history of Britain in the early 19th century--but never delved into with much further detail than a passing mention. The formation of this website, therefore, has two central motivations: the first, to provide meaningful and deliberate context for the significance of Knox’s involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. The second, and closer to the thesis of my literary work, is to showcase the impact both Knox’s public debacle and medical law had on working class literature (penny blood fiction, in particular).

Many contemporaneous critics and modern ones often discount the cheap serialized fiction published during this transition period from the Gothic novel to elevated Victorian literature due to its sensationalized content: blood and gore, body horror, and mad doctors to name a fraction of its thematic content. However, I contend that the extremes found within their pages were born of real anxieties among the working class, epitomized in this account of Knox’s career and the realities of how little he thought of the lives he touched--whether anatomically, or by virtue of the harm done to poor mourning families.