The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  One such phantasmagoric creature was Samuel Horsey, who trundled around in a wooden cart–cum–sledge. His story was that the celebrated surgeon John Abernethy had removed both his legs at St. Bartholomew’s; some thought the amputations had been the result of a war injury, others that they followed his participation in London’s anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780. He frequently frightened horses by rolling into their eyeline, then berating them loudly when they whinnied or reared in terror; and he would erupt into pubs and gin shops by bashing his cart at the doors until they burst open to let him in. Black Joe Johnson was a West Indian who wore a model of Nelson’s ship Victory built onto his hat and would come up to ground-floor windows and move his head so that the ship appeared to be sailing along the sill as he sang a sea shanty. The Dancing Doll Man of Lucca played drum and flute as puppets danced on a board in front of him, worked by strings attached to his knee (in fact, there appear to have been at least ten Dancing Doll Men of Lucca in London at the same time). Possibly in imitation of such continental élan, blind Charles Wood exhibited a poodle, the Real, Learned, French Dog, Bob, who wore a frock coat and danced to the organ played by Wood (“Look about Bob, be sharp, see what you’re about”).1 Tim Buc Too was an old African street-crossing sweeper, whose spot was at Ludgate Hill/Fleet Street; he arranged his profuse white hair so it looked as though he were wearing a pith helmet. In Camden Town, “TL,” a fifty-four-year-old former servant unable to find work, exhibited in the street his own scale model of Brunel’s Thames Tunnel—the “Great Bore” that was taking years longer than anticipated to complete.2

  Samuel Horsey was one of London’s most famous sledge beggars.

  There was a sense that these people were unlikely to survive much longer in the type of city that London was becoming and in the kind of society that was coming into being. Journalist Charles Knight expressed concern that the street sights were being “shouldered out by commerce and luxury.”3 Writing in 1841, seventeen years after the passage of the Vagrancy Act and twelve years after the arrival of the Metropolitan Police, Knight regretted that girls carrying pails of milk, fresh herbs, and watercress from the country were less often to be seen selling their goods in the streets. It was, Knight wrote, a quieter, duller London, now that the muffin man could not scream out his wares, no bugle could be sounded to announce news and events, and “chaunters” were not permitted to sing the first few lines of a broadsheet to tempt a passerby. The itinerant traders were being driven off as much by competition from fixed-location shopkeepers as by legal prohibitions on noise and nuisance; the introduction of plateglass and gas lighting and the proliferation of cheaper, more diverse, and increasingly exotic goods in shops and bazaars were rendering the peddler obsolete.

  Artistic attempts were made to capture some of the grotesque individuals who wandered the town, those who were felt to be under threat of extinction by “progress.” J. T. Smith, keeper of the prints at the British Museum, compiled Etchings of Remarkable Beggars in 1815 and Vagabondiana in 1817—both compendia of destitute people. Smith’s later work, The Cries of London, recorded the chants and ditties of dead, or soon-to-be-dead, trades. His sketches included Anatony Antonini, who carried a huge tray of silk and paper flowers (“All in full bloom!”) with plaster birds attached to them; William Conway, an itinerant spoon seller of Crabtree Row, Bethnal Green (“Hard-metal spoons to sell or mend”), who once rescued Smith when he was surrounded and threatened by a crowd while sketching another beggar (the locals had thought Smith was an authority figure, sent to snoop on them); George Smith, a rheumatic brush maker, reduced to peddling groundsel and chickweed; and Jeremiah Davies, a Welsh weight-lifting dwarf, who performed his tricks around Chancery Lane. Eking a living from the bizarrest of trades—that was typical of the city, where people subsisted on a seemingly infinite subdivision of labor, associated trades spun out of associated trades.

  Black Joe Johnson; Charles Wood and his Learned French Dog, Bob; an aged “sledge beggar”; and the Dancing Doll Man of Lucca; all sketched by J. T. Smith for his compendia of street people, Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, 1815, and Vagabondiana, 1817.

  But according to Charles Knight, “the high and rushing tide of greasy citizenry” needed the color and spectacle that poor folk such as these—even the idle or the impostor—brought to city streets. The architectural splendors of London were many; but most streets were notable for their monotony and dreariness (a look that the Victorians were to delight in defacing with large, florid buildings, from the 1860s on). Away from the main streets, deep gloom pervaded: Joseph Sadler Thomas complained that after sundown, Covent Garden market was hard to penetrate and patrol effectively since there was just one, centrally placed lamp. He could hardly see his hand in front of his face, he said: “I act in the dark.”4 Ornamentation had been severely limited by the 1774 Building Act—which imposed higher standards of house construction and fireproofing at the expense of architectural variety—and aside from the occasional flourish of stucco and portland stone, street after street was lined with brick buildings that were blackened by smoke and filth; some had even been painted black—a Georgian fancy. Houses were rarely higher than three stories, and in certain areas by the 1830s the products of the eighteenth-century building boom were proving unable to cope with the sheer numbers of people cramming into them. The squalid frowsiness of many parts of east and central London were well known (“foetid localities … infected districts,” proclaimed the architect Sydney Smirke), but the Georgian terraces of the wealthy west were also seen as dismal regions—dark, featureless, cheerless canyons of blank brick wall.5

  Nevertheless, by 1823, 215 miles of London street had been lit. The flickering glare of gaslight brought a theatrical quality to many central streets, an effect enhanced by the presence of music (players strolled the streets of the West End, and one Italian band seems to have taken up a regular perch in Portland Place, just north of Oxford Circus). The stagelike quality only enhanced the strange appearance of the crowds. Even the tide of greasy citizenry could provide a spectacle to the onlooker, a cavalcade of images not unlike the panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, and georamas that were enjoying such popularity in new, purpose-built venues. For writer Thomas De Quincey, Londoners passing along the street looked like “a masque of maniacs, a pageant of phantoms”; in a short story, Edgar Allan Poe described the giddy fascination of watching London’s “tumultuous sea of human heads” rolling by as the hero attempts to sort them into “types”; while in 1837, a doctor writing about the effect of the city on human health described Londoners as appearing distracted, pallid, shattered, sallow-complexioned, and “paralytic of limb”—puppets or automata moving to some invisible mechanical force.6

  George Scharf captured many of London’s street characters throughout the 1820s and 1830s, including itinerant vendors of many nationalities and an Italian “image boy,” second from left.

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  A huge unknowable, a subject that greatly perplexed those who looked into the question of vagrancy, was the proportion of beggars who were frauds; even a central London magistrate of long standing admitted that he could rarely distinguish someone who was genuinely out of work and hungry from someone who was quite capable of making a living but instead preyed on public sympathy.7 Appearance was an increasingly unreliable gauge: continental visitors noted that the English tended to wear clothes that did not necessarily reflect their class, and, from the start of the nineteenth century, the English working classes had reportedly shown a new interest in self-adornment.8 There was a vast trade in secondhand clothing; many householders would dress their servants in their castoffs, further eroding class distinctions in dress. To add to the confusion, thieves were known to adopt the type of clothing that parish constables or local firemen wore, in order to loiter near or enter a house to commit a burglary unchallenged. Sometimes, only the shabbiness of a garment would mark the pauper, say, from a tradesman or clerk: a policeman reported that his decision not to arrest a group frequently see
n loitering in the Bond Street area had been taken because “they are too well-dressed to be apprehended under the Vagrant Act.”9

  Journalist John Wade complained that the city dweller “is everywhere pestered with clamours, and his feelings lacerated by the spectacle of real or fictitious suffering, which ought ever to be excluded from his sight.”10 Wade believed that virtually all London beggars were fakes; many people agreed with him. Another type of compendium sprang up claiming to detail the various ruses that beggars used to fool the public and providing a glossary of street slang used by this emerging tribe of other Londoners. The anonymous pamphlet An Exposure of the Various Impostures Daily Practised by Vagrants of Every Description appealed to the cynic who wanted to be bolstered in the view that all beggars were impostors; it also tapped into the apparently large market discovered by James Hardy Vaux, a twice-transported thief and fraud whose New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of the Flash Language was published in 1819, and by journalist and comic author Pierce Egan, whose Life in London tales had translated the slang of the criminal and sporting fraternities.11 An Exposure of the Various Impostures, for example, reveals that “Lurkers” have fake documentation showing loss by wreck, fire, accident, and so on; typical scams include a Fire Lurk, a Sick Lurk, a Deaf & Dumb Lurk, a Weaver’s Lurk. “High-flyers” are begging-letter writers. “Cadgers on the downright” beg from door to door, while “Cadgers on the fly” beg from passersby. A “Shallow Lay” stands about in rags on cold days, and “Screevers” chalk on the pavement such piteous appeals as “Hunger is a sharp thorn and biteth keen” or “He that pitieth the poor lendeth to the Lord, and He will repay,” while assuming a mournful look to fool the “Flat”—the dupe, or mug. Loud groanings and lamentations were required in order to be heard over the roar of daytime traffic. (Traffic noise could be so loud that ordinary conversation was often impossible on main streets.) Ann Taylor, in her thirties, was found groaning on a doorstep in Red Cross Street, Barbican, having apparently just miscarried; when a police officer discovered that the bloody matter in her lap was a sheep’s liver, he attempted to arrest her, recognizing her as the woman who had staged a fit outside the Dicity in Red Lion Square and received bread, cheese, and five shillings from passersby. Jane Weston was sentenced to three months’ hard labor for playing the part of a starving woman with nine children; the infants were hired, and two accomplices impersonated benevolent society ladies, to provoke others into almsgiving. James Prior spent fourteen nights in jail for acting the part of a pilgrim unable to continue his journey to Canterbury without money.12 John Wade claimed that he had seen a beggar chewing soap in order to produce a more convincing fit, while J. T. Smith wrote scathingly of Italian boys’ “learned mice and chattering monkies” and recalled seeing an Italian throw his mice at a terrified nursery maid who had refused to give him any money.13

  “Walking advertisements” as rendered by George Scharf

  Despite widespread concern with fraud, criminal convictions were a hit-and-miss affair, even after the passage of the Vagrancy Act. The Parliamentary Select Committee convened in 1828 to consider the inadequacies of the old methods of policing the capital was told that it was well known that two of the four justices of the peace who sat at Great Marlborough Street magistrates office never convicted anyone of vagrancy if it was a first offense, even though they had the power to do so.14 In 1827, the committee heard, 196 of the 429 vagrants arrested and brought to Great Marlborough Street were instantly discharged, much to the anger of the arresting constables. (Figures such as these cannot give a clear indication of the true level of vagrancy in the city, since many vagrants—most, perhaps—were never arrested in the first place.) By 1832, however, imprisonment figures for vagrancy had risen significantly, suggesting that the New Police were more active in apprehending and/or more persuasive before the magistrates: the number of London vagrants committed to prison rose from 2,270 in 1829 to 6,650 in 1832.

  Still, many beggars or “disorderly” or “suspicious” characters escaped arrest because of both “old” police and New Police inactivity, or officers’ genuine fellow feeling for the street poor, or their fear of attracting an angry crowd during an arrest; other beggars benefited from the territorial disputes between the New Police and the medieval watch system that persisted in the City of London until 1839. Thus magistrate Peter Laurie, who loathed the Metropolitan Police, advised the City aldermen to keep driving any unwanted characters found in their area through the Temple Bar in Fleet Street, across the City border for the Metropolitan force to deal with, since, Laurie claimed, he had heard that West End magistrates had advised the driving of the idle and itinerant over the boundary for the City to cope with. Policing the poor had become a game of “tennis ball,” according to one City alderman. It was a spectacle that certain Londoners came to the Temple Bar to watch on a regular basis on a mild evening, enjoying the dance of pursuit and escape performed nightly between the police and the criminals.15

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  Who had the right to be in the streets? Who was entitled to space in the city? The much-discussed changes to the poor laws brought anticipation that all paupers—and thus, beggars—would soon be contained behind the high walls of grim new workhouses, with those unable to give a good account of themselves liable to imprisonment. A further crackdown was heralded in 1839 with an act of Parliament that gave the Metropolitan Police even greater powers to suppress noise and nuisance created by street sellers and the more enterprising beggars.16

  The Poor Laws that existed in 1831 had been devised in 1601, and one of their most important innovations had been the giving by the parish of “relief” (cash, food, clothing, and so on) to needy parishioners who applied for it and who were considered poor enough to warrant such state charity. In 1662, another law, the Act of Settlement, had been framed to coerce the poor into staying put—into not traveling the land in search of work or better pay and thereby causing local labor shortages or forcing the hand of local employers. Settlement meant that individuals were tied to their parish—usually their place of birth, though women were entitled to settlement in their husband’s parish upon marriage.17 (The “beating of the bounds” is a medieval tradition that remains as spectacle in certain parts of England. On Ascension Day, a parish boy—usually an apprentice—was whipped with a willow wand at the parish boundaries, to remind him, illiterate as he probably was, of where he belonged and where he did not belong.) Parish authorities were responsible for providing help to the local poor; but this assistance was to be given only to those with a settlement in the parish. Admission to the workhouse was one way of feeding and housing those without work, the sick, and the old; another was the system of “outdoor relief,” which meant that the poor could, in theory at least, receive cash payments, food, and fuel, along with advances to buy work tools, clothing, and shoes, while remaining in their own homes—or out on the street.18 The economic depressions of 1815 and 1825 pushed up the poor-rate levy paid by householders; where the nation’s poor rates had amounted to around £2 million at the turn of the century, in 1832 the figure stood at £8.6 million. One Briton in ten was wholly or partially dependent on poor relief. In 1821, Parliament had debated removing the right to any kind of relief to the able-bodied; but, with memories of Paris 1789 still fresh, it balked at such an inflammatory move.

  The system of settlement was yet another antiquated, inadequate mechanism that was failing in the face of the needs of post–Industrial Revolution Britain. Casual, often factory-based, employment required a large influx of potential workers into town, though the jobs were often precarious or seasonal. Moreover, settlement disputes were a notoriously complex maze for even a lawyer to negotiate and took up an inordinate amount of time in the lower courts; the cost of such legal wrangles to the parishes of Great Britain was running at over £250,000 a year by the end of the Napoleonic Wars.19 John Wade, writing in 1829, was amazed at the confusion and the potential for abuse of poor relief that the settlement system created. A surprising number o
f individuals, he claimed, were unable to name the parish to which they “belonged,” particularly the London-born poor, who were “so little acquainted with themselves”—a striking phrase that prefigures much later writing about the effects of urban living on the soul. “The number of persons,” wrote Wade, “who, with their families, find their way to the metropolis from the remote parts of Great Britain and Ireland, in hopes of finding employment, is inconceivable.… Having incurred the expense and fatigue of the journey, and entertaining hopes, probably, of a change in circumstances, they are loth to apply to the parishes where accident has fixed them and thereby subject themselves to forcible removal. In this dilemma, they often linger till all they possess in the world is sold or pledged, and then falling into utter destitution, the females do not infrequently resort to prostitution, the feeble-spirited among the males to begging, those of more profligate principles to petty thefts or more atrocious offences, contributing to swell the general mass of delinquency.” Wade estimated that around thirteen thousand people were removed from London and “passed back” (that is, forcibly returned by wagon to their parish of settlement, and to rural destitution) each year. Yet he conceded that there was no practical way of keeping someone where he or she did not want to live. Those who did stay in London were not properly dealt with by the parochial authorities, he wrote, but were passed from parish to parish, “driven to and fro like a weaver’s shuttle.”20