Ghost of Margaret Dickson: Patriarchy, Law, & Scotland's Most Infamous Hanging

A Presentation by Mikki Brock

In 1724, Margaret Dickson was executed for the murder of her newborn child. The state’s case against her had been extraordinarily weak, and no harm to the infant had been proven. The baby, found near the banks of the River Tweed, was almost certainly stillborn. Margaret’s real crime was that she neither revealed her illegitimate pregnancy to others nor called for help during the birth—decisions that, according to Scotland’s draconian infanticide law, implied intent to murder. The charges against her had been brought in a moment of intense fear that women pregnant outside of wedlock might become murdering mothers; she had lost her child in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her case soon became infamous, largely because it had a surprise ending: Margaret survived her hanging.

This talk is about Professor Brock’s new book project, which explores the life, revival, and afterlife of “Half-Hangit Maggie,” an ordinary Scottish woman who became a marvel, a celebrity, a villain, a folk hero, a literary inspiration, and a stop on ghost tours. This is a story about a woman who experienced a pregnancy loss and was convicted for child murder under a deeply religious and patriarchal legal regime, whose case engendered an extended debate about power, sin, and culpability. This eighteenth-century story of one woman’s tragedy turned public spectacle speaks directly to the criminalization of reproductive decisions in our post-Dobbs moment.

Mikki Brock is a Professor of History at Washington and Lee University. A scholar of religion, gender, and the supernatural in early modern Scotland, she is the author of Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland (2016). Her second monograph, Plagues of the heart: Crisis and covenanting in a seventeenth-century Scottish town, was published in fall 2024 with Manchester University Press. As a Newhouse fellow, Brock is working on her newest book project, tentatively titled An Unnatural Woman: Crime, Gender, and Spectacle in Eighteenth-Century Scotland. 

Lunch will be provided. Kindly RSVP by Thursday, February 20th.