MACKAY, R.

Australia Felix. Happy Homes for Happy People. 1. Under the Ground; A Story of the Bottle. (Registered Copyright.) R. Mackay, Melbourne. [cover title]

Melbourne, [The Author], [undated, possibly 1870s?].

Octavo (185 x 123 mm), 32 pages.

Saddle-stitched title-wrappers (with the details printed within a decorative border); exposed pages dusty and a little marked, with some loss to silverfish to the top blank margin of the first ten leaves and the last leaf (with the moderate damage to the first two leaves diminishing quickly to minor loss to the top edge); a decent copy of an unrecorded item.

Not in Ferguson; not in Trove. A temperance tract with a difference; for one thing, it is addressed primarily to the 'Householders who are Houseletters' ('Are they not responsible to some extent for the character and doings of their tenants? ... Melbourne is rearing some stately buildings above ground. But it is building a basement storey as well; which is growing wider, and is sinking deeper into the mire every year' - well, morally, if not literally, he hastens to add). More significantly however, apart from the title page and preface on its verso, almost the entire pamphlet is devoted to a very detailed discussion of the Burke and Hare Murders, and the subsequent trials of William Burke and Helen Macdougal. William Burke and William Hare committed 16 (or more) murders in 1828 in Edinburgh, and sold the corpses to Doctor Robert Knox for dissection at his anatomy lectures. But as R. Mackay so eloquently puts it at the end of his 'terribly true' tale, 'Burke had another accomplice beside Macdougal and the Hares - one which gave him powerful help - and without which he never could have carried on his dismal trade. I mean the Bottle. Why was it not put upon its trial - and being found guilty, condemned to suffer the penalties of the law? I shall put it upon its trial now....'.

Item #105993

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