The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Notes for Non-Londoners

  Currency Conversion

  1. Suspiciously Fresh

  2. Persons Unknown

  3. The Thickest Part

  4. Houseless Wretches

  5. Systematic Slaughter

  6. Houseless Wretches Again

  7. Neighbors

  8. Meat—An Interlude

  9. Whatever Has Happened to Fanny?

  10. A Horrid System

  11. At the Bailey

  12. A Newgate Stink

  13. I, John Bishop …

  14. Day of Dissolution

  15. The Use of the Dead to the Living

  16. How Many?

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Peter

  Of the common folk that is merely bundled up in turf and brambles, the less said, the better. A poor lot, soon forgot.

  —Stony Durdles,

  funerary stonemason, in Charles Dickens’s

  The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)

  Preface

  Toward the end of 1831, London’s Metropolitan Police were alerted to a ghastly series of crimes. They appeared to be imitations of the notorious Burke and Hare killings in Edinburgh three years earlier, in which at least sixteen people were murdered and their bodies sold for medical dissection. I first came across the London killings—or the “Italian Boy” case, as it was known—in the course of writing a newspaper article about an East End council housing estate in Bethnal Green that had been built on the site of one of the nineteenth century’s most notorious slums. It was said that the surrounding district had been tainted for decades by the grisly crimes committed in Nova Scotia Gardens, a neighborhood of tiny, odd-looking cottages that had probably been built as homes-cum-workshops for weavers, of whom there were some fifteen thousand in the area at the start of the nineteenth century. And indeed, on investigation I learned that in the late autumn of 1831, No. 3 Nova Scotia Gardens had had infamy thrust upon it by its residents, John Bishop and Thomas Williams, and an associate, James May—all of them body snatchers, or “resurrection men,” who were charged with murdering a vagrant child.

  The “London Burkers” have been eclipsed by their Edinburgh counterparts, whose story has inspired many retellings and film and stage interpretations; but in fact it was the London case, not Burke and Hare, that sped the passage of controversial legislation to make the unclaimed bodies of paupers legally available to surgeons for dissection. The Anatomy Act was passed by Parliament within ten months of the investigation into the events at Nova Scotia Gardens, heralding the beginning of the end of body snatching in Britain. But the case also revealed some extremely unpleasant aspects of life in London—a city that had increased by one-third between 1801 and 1831 to over one and a half million inhabitants, the most diverse population anywhere on earth.

  The Italian Boy case occurred on one of recent history’s fault lines: the Regency was over—those years of roistering dandies and beaux, of newly gaslit streets and shopping arcades, and the heroics of the Napoleonic Wars, but also of political oppression and economic collapse, of sclerotic institutions unable to adapt to the new industrial age, of the Bloody Code and its vicious punishments for petty crimes, and of a rigid governing elite determined to avoid the violent fate of France’s ancien régime. Victoria was yet to ascend the throne, and her new age of moral certainty and love of order—the era when statistics, bureaucracy, a highly professionalized civil service, and legal and medical elites came to dominate—was not in place. Not yet. Not quite. William IV ruled from 1830 to 1837—a short reign, but a mighty turbulent one for all that. There is no mistaking the flavor, the mood, of the late 1820s and early 1830s in the writings that have survived. Everywhere is heard an insistent call for more fundamental and faster change in every aspect of British life: Parliament, the judiciary, the church, medicine, jails, schools, public and private manners and mores, architecture, city planning—all were loudly condemned as outmoded, inefficient, unworkable, “old.” Britain was seen as tottering on the edge of collapse because it could not embrace and implement change.

  In this Era without a Name, the Reform Act of 1832 would see the middle classes begin to wrest power from the aristocracy and the church, and the newly enfranchised tradesmen, industrialists, and administrators strive to separate themselves from the poor. But if the common man—laborer, artisan, or pauper—had expected to benefit from the advance of democracy, he was to be badly disappointed. The 1832 act gave the vote to just one-seventh of the adult male population; the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 would see those who sought parish relief incarcerated in institutions that were prisons in all but name, while the living conditions of “the submerged tenth” (the phrase belongs to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, writing in 1890) were to remain a source of shame and disgrace to the richest nation on earth for the rest of the century.

  Following the Italian Boy case in the newspapers of the day, I became curious about the type of people who had fallen into the path of the accused on their nightly prowls around the metropolis. What sort of city was London in 1831—what sort of country was England?—that children and young adults could seemingly be picked off by anyone who chose to prey on their fellow man: burkers, brothel keepers, Fagin-style procurers of pickpockets, sex offenders, press-gangs. What sort of people could simply disappear unnoticed from the city’s streets? Why, even in death, did their identities remain mysterious? How much of the history of the very poor—the destitute—has come down to us? What sorts of evidence could be trusted to give a reliable picture of their lives? What did they think of themselves?

  The Italian Boy case also seemed to provide a rich archival source for learning how nondestitute, ordinary lower-class Londoners perceived themselves, as well as those both poorer and wealthier than them, and for examining their notions of community and criminality in this strange new society that was forming in their city. The story appeared to me to be a window on the lives of the poor at a period of great change: a window that is badly damaged—opaque in places, blacked out or shattered in others—but offers a rare glimpse of those who have left little authentic trace of themselves.

  Before the advent of oral history, the poor were able to tell us little about themselves directly; the very poor could tell us even less. The material remnants of their lives have largely disintegrated—the coarse paper of the broadsheets they read, the hovels they lived in—while most of their songs, stories, and sayings have passed unrecorded. The very poor are persons unknown—an enigma for the social historian, a deafening silence that roars down the centuries. Those working-class people in the 1820s and 1830s who were literate (around half of poor Londoners were) had, ordinarily, scant access to writing materials and publishers or printers, still less time to write. Committing thoughts and feelings to paper—making oneself the object of investigation and discussion—is a strange act for anyone to undertake, all the more bizarre if you have little time and money. And while a number of British working-class autobiographies have been discovered by historians, these were almost all written in later years by people who had been able to cha
nge their social status or who had become part of a larger force—labor unions or religious societies—with which their sense of self and personal history had merged.

  What we know of the lives of the very poor in the first half of the nineteenth century is thus mediated by those outside their culture; we hear their stories filtered through people who, with the most sympathetic of hearts and imaginative of minds, were nevertheless strangers traveling in a strange land—even William Cobbett, even Thomas De Quincey, even Henry Mayhew. I have had to rely on such sources far more than I would have liked. The journalist, the magistrate, the prison official, the Parliamentary Select Committee member, the charity official all allow us to see the very poor over their shoulders; but they edit, paraphrase, pass comment on, and even overtly criticize the object of their interest. Despite these reservations, I still believe the greatest commentator on the London very poor remains Charles Dickens, who was able to draw on personal experience when he wrote Oliver Twist in 1837–38. As a twelve-year-old left to fend for himself in central London, he had felt himself in danger of falling into destitution; he had observed the vagrant young of Covent Garden at first hand, and with his creation of Jo, the street-crossing sweeper in Bleak House (1852–53), he managed to climb inside the mind of one of the hordes of urban outcast children. For this reason, Dickens weaves in and out of the following pages.

  Researching this book took me down many blind alleys as I tried to piece together the criminal careers of John Bishop, Thomas Williams, James May, and other London body snatchers. Official records were not obliged to be kept of cases heard in magistrates’ courts (which is where anyone arrested for possession of an illegally disinterred body would be examined), and justices of the peace habitually failed to supply the higher courts with written details of those they had convicted—an oversight that was as infuriating to the Home Office of the day as it is to the modern historian. Body-snatching cases did make it into the national newspapers, but the coverage of the hearings is uneven at best; worse still, most snatchers had aliases—some of them had several—and it was not always clear who, exactly, was on trial. (To compound the researcher’s problem, the 1820s and 1830s registers of the London jails where snatchers were confined if convicted—primarily Coldbath Fields Prison and Clerkenwell New Prison—have not, for the most part, survived.) In an age when guilt was often established by eyewitness evidence, and sentences decided on the notion of good or bad repute, it was in the criminal’s interest to keep his or her identity as fluid as possible. As one penal reform campaigner wrote in despair: “No man goes into Newgate twice with the same name, trade, or place of nativity.” So Bishop, Williams, and May may well be lurking in the records under assumed names.

  Several other things spoke out from the archive sources: the deference shown by many in the case toward the judiciary and other authority figures; the central role of drink in the lives of the protagonists; the increasing tendency in the city toward the identification of its citizens—badges and uniforms, registers, licenses, and permits were all coming into place or were expected soon; allied to this, the growing urge to tie things down, to lash people to their “proper” place and put a stop to urban nomadism; and finally, the sense that, in these years before the laying of London’s great drains, people were living in a giant cesspit—picking their way between fecal matter and pools of urine. Physically this was a city quite different from today’s capital; many of the most famous structures and the broadest, most traveled roads had yet to be constructed; populous, densely built areas were yet to be razed. To those in authority in 1831, London’s topography—its sinuous streets and unlit warrens—connived at criminality: there were frequent calls for the lanes and alleys to be illuminated, straightened out, or flattened altogether. Nova Scotia Gardens itself was so obscure a destination its name never appeared on any map. The Italian Boy case reminded city dwellers, rich and poor, that at the heart of London—a city that felt itself to be on the brink of reform and “modernization”—lay unknown, unknowable mysteries.

  Notes for Non-Londoners

  The action in this book took place in a number of central London districts, all within a radius of two miles of the area known as the City. Also known as the Square Mile, the City was and remains an administrative enclave within Greater London. It abuts the poor East End district of Whitechapel; to the west it is bordered by Holborn, to the north by St. Luke’s, Old Street, and to the south by the river Thames.

  Covent Garden, lying west of the City, was a half-poor, half-prosperous area between the Strand and the dreadful slum area of St. Giles.

  Just to the northeast of Covent Garden, Holborn was an area of similarly mixed levels of prosperity, and parts of it were called “Little Italy” because of the many Italian immigrants who settled there.

  Although both Covent Garden and Holborn are to the west of the City, neither counts as the West End, which is the term applied to the wealthier areas slightly farther west, such as Regent Street, Oxford Street, Hanover Square, and Mayfair.

  Smithfield is just inside the City border, at its western edge; it was notorious for the filth, noise, and commotion caused by its famous live-meat market.

  Bethnal Green in 1831 was a desperately poor working-class area to the northeast of the City.

  Spitalfields, Whitechapel, and Shoreditch, which were once equally poor eastern districts, lie to the south of Bethnal Green.

  The Elephant and Castle, another area that, like Covent Garden, contained a population with mixed fortunes, is one mile south of the Thames.

  The Borough—site of the United Hospitals of St. Thomas’s and Guy’s, plus the Webb Street private anatomical school—is just over London Bridge on the south bank of the Thames.

  Currency Conversion

  One guinea

  =21 shillings

  =252 pennies (d)

  One pound

  =20 shillings

  =240d

  One crown

  =5 shillings

  =60d

  Half a crown

  =2 shillings and 6d

  =30d

  One florin/guilder

  =2 shillings

  =24d

  One shilling (bob)

  =12d

  One farthing

  =¼d

  London Prices, Early 1830s

  Hackney cab fare, Old Bailey to Shoreditch Church (1½ miles)

  2 shillings

  Glass/pint of Blue Ruin gin

  3d/1 shilling

  Glass/pint of cheap gin

  2d/10d

  A quarter loaf of bread

  9d

  A pint of porter

  2d

  10 lbs. potatoes

  4d

  Charles Dickens’s weekly factory wage as a twelve-year-old in 1824

  6–7 shillings (15–16 guineas/year)

  Weekly wage of an East End silk weaver in 1831 (twelve-hour day)

  5–7 shillings (12–16 guineas/year)

  A well-paid workingman’s yearly salary

  75–80 guineas

  A well-paid manservant’s weekly salary

  1 guinea (50–55 guineas/year)

  Starting weekly salary for New Police constables

  1 guinea (50–55 guineas/year)

  Average cost of an Old Bailey prosecution

  £3 10s

  Average cost of a fresh corpse in 1831

  8–12 guineas

  ONE

  Suspiciously Fresh

  George Beaman, surgeon to the parish of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, turned back the scalp of the corpse lying before him. Beneath the skin he observed coagulated blood, and, peeling away the flesh along the length of the neck, he saw similar minor hemorrhages at the top of the spinal column. He concluded that death had been caused by a sharp blow to the back of the neck.

  The body was that of a boy of around fourteen years of age, four feet six inches in height, with fair hair and gray eyes that were bloodshot and bulging. Blood oozed from an inch-long woun
d on his left temple, and his toothless gums were dripping blood. At the time of his killing, a meal—which had included potatoes and a quantity of rum—was being digested. A large, powerful hand had grasped the boy on his left forearm—black bruises from the finger marks were plainly visible—and earth or clay had been smeared across the torso and thighs. The chest appeared to have caved in slightly, as though someone had knelt on it. The heart contained scarcely any blood, which Beaman took to indicate a very sudden death, but all the other organs were found to have been unremarkable and perfectly healthy. The most perplexing thing about the corpse was its freshness: it had been alive three days earlier, Beaman felt sure; and it was also clear to the surgeon that despite the bits of earth and clay, this body had never been buried, had never even been laid out in preparation for burial—and yet it had been delivered to King’s College’s anatomy department as a Subject for medical students to dissect.

  It was late evening, Sunday, 6 November 1831, and Beaman was anatomizing the corpse in the tiny watch house in the graveyard of St. Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, at the request of local magistrates. He and a number of fellow surgeons had been probing and exploring the body in the first-floor room since early afternoon. A sunny winter’s day had turned into a chilly evening by the time the medical men had made up their mind about the cause of death. As Beaman and his colleagues left, two young trainees, by now feeling faint with tiredness and nausea, stayed in the cold, stuffy room to sew up the corpse. Working alongside Beaman had been Herbert Mayo and Richard Partridge, respectively professor and “demonstrator,” or lecturer, of anatomy at King’s College, just a few streets away in the Strand. The day before, Partridge had sent for the police when one of the body-snatching gangs that supplied disinterred corpses to medical schools had tipped this body out of a sack and onto the stone floor of the dissecting room at King’s. It had looked suspiciously fresh. Partridge tricked the body snatchers into waiting at King’s while police officers were summoned, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, John Bishop, James May, and Thomas Williams were arrested on suspicion of murder, along with Michael Shields, a porter who had carried the body.