The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  It is also possible, and equally unprovable, that AB was Bishop himself: there is a similarity between AB’s intelligent, sardonic, and saturnine replies to committee questions and the syntax and flavor of Bishop’s answers in his court hearings. The committee report reveals that AB started snatching at roughly the same time that Bishop is thought to have become a full-time resurrectionist. AB worked with one partner; Bishop worked with just one accomplice for seven years, between 1821 and 1828, the date of the Select Committee’s hearings. AB claimed to know the Spitalfields Gang; Spitalfields is just south of Bethnal Green. AB had been shot at by a graveyard guard from two yards’ distance; Bishop had scars on his chin and had broken both legs at some point. AB had served a six-month sentence in jail; so had Bishop. AB had in his best year lifted a hundred corpses; Bishop had lifted five hundred to a thousand by 1831.

  The committee’s hearings were described years later in All the Year Round, the journal that Charles Dickens “conducted” and wrote for: “For several days in the summer of 1829, a certain committee room of the House of Commons, as well as all the passages leading to it, were thronged by some of the vilest beings that have perhaps ever visited such respectable places. Sallow, cadaverous, gaunt men, dressed in greasy moleskin or rusty black, and wearing wisps of dirty white handkerchiefs round their wizen necks. They had the air of wicked sextons, or thievish gravediggers; there was a suspicion of degraded clergymen about them, mingled with a dash of Whitechapel costermonger. Their ghoulish faces were rendered horrible by smirks of self-satisfied cunning, and their eyes squinted with sidelong suspicion, fear and distrust. They had been raked together from their favourite house of call, the Fortune of War in Smithfield. There were terrible rumours that when ‘subjects’ ran short, they had a way of making dead bodies.”17 This has the smack of eyewitness remembrance, and it is possible that Dickens himself had a hand in the piece (though no Dickens authority has made such an attribution). However, the Select Committee on Anatomy sat in the summer of 1828, not 1829 (which would have been an unusual error for Dickens to have made), and there is something rather fanciful about the notion of a “throng” of London resurrectionists coming to Parliament by invitation. Whatever the truth, only three men’s evidence has entered the record.

  * * *

  If information on the resurrection trade is hard to come by, the life of John Bishop is—happily—better documented. He was born in Highgate in 1797, the son of a hardworking, locally respected, “plain, plodding man” also called John, who ran a successful carting business from the family home on North Hill, Highgate, transporting goods to and from the city 350 feet below and four miles to the south.18 Transportation was one of Highgate’s biggest trades; some eighty coaches a day stopped at the village’s Red Lion inn on the route to and from the north. Highgate also had a formidable drinking culture, with around twenty licensed taverns within its parish boundaries.19

  John Bishop the son, the second of five children, lost his mother when he was eight years old. His father remarried and had more children, including a daughter, Rhoda, born in 1813; when the second wife died, Bishop married for a third time. In November 1816, John Bishop the father was run over by a van and both his legs had to be amputated at the hip; he died two weeks after the operation. The people of Highgate collected the considerable sum of three hundred pounds for his widow, Sarah, who was eight months pregnant. But within weeks it became apparent that John Bishop the son and Sarah were living as man and wife. The locals tried to recoup their money, but most of it had already been spent—on what, it is not known.

  John Bishop took over his father’s carting business and added three other moneymaking activities: informing on local criminals to the parish constables to secure reward money (his favorite drinking den was the Green Dragon, where informers congregated), hiring himself out as a witness/alibi man in court cases—committing perjury for a fee, and ferrying bodies around in his cart for a resurrection gang. The Old Bailey—as well as being a gathering place for resurrectionists—was the center of London’s carting trade, and the Bailey’s dual role is likely to have played a part in drawing Bishop further and further into resurrection and away from legitimate carting. (Many, perhaps most, resurrectionists had a prior and/or simultaneous connection with conveying goods, as carters or as porters.) Bishop teamed up with a noted resurrectionist—identity unknown—and between them they were reputed to have emptied the churchyard at the nearby village of Holloway. Sometime before 1820, Bishop sold his father’s business to a rival firm and disposed of a small piece of Highgate Common owned by his father, raising eighty pounds—more than a year’s wages for an averagely successful workingman. Sarah, for her part, had been given a charitable allowance of fifteen shillings a week, paid out by the duchess of St. Albans (Highgate’s own local aristocrat, who had taken pity on Sarah’s plight and had been unable or unwilling to stop the payments on hearing the scandalous talk of the widow’s relationship with her stepson). Whatever else they were, John Bishop and his stepmother-wife did not start their life together poor. They married on 2 August 1818, and it is likely that Highgate residents’ disapproval of their liaison contributed to their decision to abandon the north London village for the east of London; in the mid-1820s, the family was living in Pitfield Street, Hoxton, a poor but relatively “respectable” eastern area.20

  Thomas Hosmer Shepherd’s 1814 aquatint of Old Bailey, the street that gave its name to the Sessions House (seen on the right). Newgate Prison is the building to the left of the courthouse; out of view on the far left is the King of Denmark, and hidden by the covered wagon is the Fortune of War. The cattle, sheep, and drovers have walked down from Smithfield, which lies beyond.

  By 1831, according to his own estimate, Bishop had sold between five hundred and a thousand bodies to the surgeons of London. He had always been confident of his talents; on one occasion, after being released from Bow Street magistrates court when a charge against him was dropped, he passed the courthouse the next day, pulled a handful of sovereigns from his pocket, and called across to one of the police officers standing outside, “You see! You cannot keep me from it. I got another stiff ’un last night and had nine guineas for it.”21 According to a report in the Morning Advertiser, Bishop’s success as a snatcher was the result of his patience and stealth rather than of any feats involving daring or physical strength; the newspaper claimed that among resurrectionists, he was considered something of a coward. As graveyard security tightened, Bishop became a prolific stealer of corpses from coroners’ and undertakers’ premises and from parish “bone houses” after bribing the watchman or splitting his fees with him. He was also said to be adept at playing the relative of a vagrant dying in a workhouse, often accompanied, the same report claimed, by Sarah or “a friend.” He must have operated on tip-offs, for it is said that he occasionally took lodgings, posing as a traveling carpenter and carrying a large basket, in a house where a corpse was lying in wake, absconding on his first night and taking the body with him. Bishop was once double-crossed by a watchman at a workhouse in Shoreditch—not far from his Hoxton home—who had promised to sell him six pauper bodies; the watchman alerted the authorities but Bishop and his accomplices spotted the trap and ran off. He would not always be so lucky and spent several stretches in jail.

  In 1825, he served two months in Clerkenwell New Prison for having possession of an illegally disinterred corpse.22 As a result of a later stretch, in Coldbath Fields Prison, he makes an appearance in Captain George Laval Chesterton’s Revelations of Prison Life. Chesterton was the governor of Coldbath Fields from 1829 (later becoming a friend of Charles Dickens’s), and Bishop passed through Chesterton’s jail sometime in 1829, 1830, or 1831. Writing in 1856, Chesterton recalled Bishop as “without exception, the most finished ruffian within my memory,” with a “powerful frame, of repulsive countenance, and of brutal address and manners.… He entered the prison uttering oaths and execrations, and indulging in the grossest language, while he assailed the subo
rdinates, and even myself, with menace and defiance. He had received no provocation, but gave vent to the irrepressible brutality of his nature.” However, fourteen days of solitary confinement (a treatment being pioneered by Chesterton) wrought an extraordinary change in the man: “That iron-souled miscreant became so meek and subdued, so prone to tears, so tremulous and agitated … he could hardly be recognised as the same coarse and blustering bully.” Nevertheless, claimed Chesterton, when Bishop passed from Coldbath Fields to Newgate Prison, where he was free to mingle with other prisoners, “I found, on inquiry, that renewed association with lawless men had revived the brutality so inseparable from his nature.”23

  Bishop narrowly escaped being transported for perjury in December 1827, when, for a fee of three pounds, he gave a false alibi for two horse thieves, Thomas Chapman and William Johnson. The jury at Chapman and Johnson’s trial did not accept Bishop’s story that the pair had been drinking with him in the Plough Inn, Smithfield (directly opposite the Fortune of War), on the afternoon of 5 October, believing instead that they had been stealing two mares 120 miles away in Gloucestershire. Bishop was hopelessly evasive in the witness box and attempted to pass himself off as a general carrier (“I move any goods—it does not make much odds to me”), refusing to name the crime for which he had twice been arrested.24 Instead of being transported, Bishop was jailed for a brief time for lying to the court; Chapman and Johnson were executed.

  In April 1831, he was involved in a perplexing case, which was heard at Guildhall magistrates court. Bishop and codefendant Joseph Taylor were accused of stealing the body of an elderly man called Gardner from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. Gardner’s daughter-in-law deposed that she had given Gardner, who had been suffering with “a spinal complaint,” a meal on the evening of Friday, 18 March, and sent him off with a shilling to find a bed for the night in a lodging house. The next day, Taylor and Bishop called at Mrs. Gardner’s house and said that they had met the old man in the street, that he had been feeling very ill, and that if Mrs. Gardner would give them a shilling, they would see that he gained free admittance to the casual ward at St. Bartholomew’s; they would swear to the medical staff that Gardner had no friends within a hundred miles of London, which would, they said, guarantee him free treatment. Mrs. Gardner agreed to this, and on Sunday the twentieth Taylor came to her to say that he had indeed had the old man admitted as a charity patient but that she should not go to see him in the hospital as her visit might jeopardize his free treatment. One week later, however, Taylor turned up again to tell her that Gardner had died in the hospital on the twenty-fourth and had been quickly interred within St. Bartholomew’s own burial ground. When Mrs. Gardner checked with the hospital, she was told that Bishop and Taylor had called for and removed the corpse themselves, saying that they would pay for a private burial outside the hospital’s grounds.

  Coldbath Fields Prison stood on the site of today’s Mount Pleasant Royal Mail depot, London’s main post office. John Bishop served more than one sentence here for body snatching.

  Though several details are troubling—Did Bishop and Taylor hasten the old man’s death somehow, before his admission to St. Bartholomew’s? And why would Mrs. Gardner give money to a stranger to assist her frail father-in-law?—there is no suggestion that anything other than body snatching was suspected by the Guildhall magistrates, and indeed all charges against Bishop and Taylor were eventually dropped.25

  In July 1830, Bishop and his family moved to a rented cottage in a semirural, semislum part of Bethnal Green—a neighborhood more impoverished than nearby Hoxton. Their landlady was Sarah Trueby, who lived nearby with her husband and grown-up son. The relocation suggests that the Bishops had come down in the world—for reasons unknown, though the proportion of his income that Bishop was spending on drink is likely to have been a factor. Despite a generous inheritance, the duchess’s allowance, the funds raised locally, the earnings from resurrection and from Sarah’s work as a seamstress and laundress, the Bishops and their children were reduced to living in one of the most squalid areas of east London.

  * * *

  Right on the border of Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, Nova Scotia Gardens was a stretch of land just north of St. Leonard’s Church. Its level was slightly below that of the surrounding streets, and some referred to it as the Hackney Road Hollow. John Stow’s Survey of London (1603) mentions some houses recently built in the vicinity upon “the common soil—for it was a leystall” (dunghill). By 1750, according to contemporary maps, the area consisted largely of fields on the fringes of the Huguenot settlements of Spitalfields, to the south.

  It is possible that these fields were at some point ploughed up for clay and mud to be made into bricks, which were baked in kilns built on the field itself; this had been the fate of many of the meadows of Bethnal Green during the eighteenth-century building boom.26 By the 1820s, the older horticultural and food-related names of surrounding streets (Crabtree Row, Birdcage Walk, Orange Street, Cock Lane, Bacon Street) were being joined by the martial, naval, and colonial designations of the rows of two-story, brick terraced housing springing up in the environs. The Gardens had become Nova Scotia Gardens and nearby were Virginia Row, Nelson Street, Gibraltar Walk, and Wellington Street.

  The Gardens comprised a number of cottages that by 1831 were noticeably quaint; they were interconnected by narrow, zigzagging pathways. Nos. 2 and 3, both of which were owned by the Trueby family, formed a semidetached unit and were not inside the labyrinth of Nova Scotia Gardens but near Crabtree Row and the main entrance into the Gardens. Bishop’s house, No. 3, had a side gate, opening onto a path known locally as the Private Way, and the house was entered by a back door, close to a coal cellar. No. 2 opened directly onto the largest path, connecting the Gardens to Crabtree Row. A four-inch-thick brick wall separated the dwellings. Each cottage consisted of two upstairs rooms, a downstairs parlor, eight feet by seven, a smaller room housing the staircase, and a washhouse extension. The downstairs window overlooked the back garden. The roof of Nos. 2 and 3 was unusual in sloping sharply down from the front of the building to the back, and this may indicate that the cottages were built—like so much housing in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields—as homes for weavers: the lack of an overhanging front gable would allow light to pour into the upper rooms, which may once have contained looms. Each cottage had a thirty-foot-long, ten-foot-wide garden, divided from its neighbor by three-foot-high wooden palings, in which was a small gate. The generous size of these back gardens may reflect an earlier use as tenter grounds, to stretch and dry silk; a second theory is that the Gardens had once been allotments and that the cottages had developed from a colony of gardeners’ huts or summer houses.27

  Nova Scotia Gardens in 1831. John Bishop’s cottage, No. 3, is on the right, abutting No. 2, where Thomas Williams lived for a few weeks.

  At the end of each garden was a privy. The garden of No. 3 also contained a well to be shared with Nos. 1 and 2, though in fact the residents of many of the cottages could have reached it easily; it was halfway down the garden and consisted of a wooden barrel, one and a half feet in diameter, sunk into the soil.

  The former dunghill and its surrounds had, during the 1664–65 plague, seen some of the highest mortality figures in the capital. In 1831, the area’s old reputation for poverty and despair was returning. The 1825 collapse of the English silk trade—the result of a surge in cheaper textile imports from France—proved calamitous, since weaving and cloth working had provided thousands of households in Bethnal Green and Spitalfields with an income. By 1829, wages among skilled workers in the silk trade, which employed an estimated fifteen thousand people, were half what they had been between 1815 and 1825. The governor of the Bethnal Green workhouse revealed that admissions had risen from 498 in 1821 to 1,160 in 1831.28 One eyewitness wrote of “the dwarfish and dwindled weavers of Spitalfields”; any man over five feet two inches was not a native of Spitalfields, he claimed. These men rarely made it to the age of sixty and proved too we
ak and broken by their fourteen-to-sixteen-hour workdays to say more than a few sentences at a public meeting convened to discuss the issue of free trade, which had opened English markets to foreign imports. At twenty, the commentator noted, Spitalfields men looked thirty; at forty, they looked sixty, with “squalor and misery etched into their faces.”29 Letters from Londoners concerned about conditions in this part of the East End—unpaved, undrained, unlit—were starting to appear in the newspapers. The Morning Advertiser printed a complaint about the filth outside the violin-string factory in Princes Street, just south of Nova Scotia Gardens—a mess (mainly consisting of cat offal) that was five feet wide and one foot deep—while “An Observer” wrote to the same paper to report the level of filth in Castle Street, two hundred yards from the Gardens and home to the Feathers, one of the local beerhouses patronized by John Bishop.30

  In July 1831, one year after the Bishops arrived, the house adjoining theirs was leased by the Truebys to Thomas Williams. Williams was born Thomas Head in Bridgnorth, Shropshire, on 28 February 1803. Although Bridgnorth was a thriving town at the start of its long and lucrative association with the carpet-weaving industry, George and Mary Head, his parents, moved with their children to London, to Highgate, at some point in the second decade of the century, and from there to the less salubrious Smithfield district. Thomas tried and failed at more than one trade, having been apprenticed to a bricklayer, then taking up carpentry before turning to working as a porter for local glass manufacturers. As an adolescent, he had started to drink heavily and steal, despite coming from what appears to have been a comparatively stable and loving family. His mother was reportedly devoted to her son and watched with dismay his decline into crime.