The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  Descriptions of Smithfield challenged even the most euphemistic of writers. It is clear that offal, excrement (“filth”), and urine (“steam”) had to be negotiated by a pedestrian. Quite apart from the stink and refuse from the market and the slaughterhouses, associated trades helped to contaminate the nearby streets—the sausage makers, tanners, cat- and rabbit-fur dressers, bladder blowers, tripe dressers, bone dealers, cat-gut manufacturers, neat’s-foot-oil makers. Here is Charles Dickens attempting to convey the aura of Smithfield to a family readership, in Great Expectations: “The shameful place, being all asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me.” And in Oliver Twist: “The ground was covered, nearly ankle deep, with filth and mire; and a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney tops, hung heavily above.… Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a dense mass.”13 Dickens did not attempt to address the issue of animal slaughter itself, which frequently took place in the cellars or back yards of ill-adapted private houses; but others, intent on reform, did not spare the detail. For the Smoothe Field that had been just outside the medieval city walls was now right in the center of a busy metropolis, the capital of a great and growing imperial power—and its goings-on were, frankly, not respectable.14 These matters were handled better in France, the Select Committee on Smithfield discovered, and the abattoirs of Paris were analyzed and eulogized by committee witnesses. While local bylaws forbade any emission of blood from a slaughterhouse, it was, nevertheless, a regular sight across the pathways of Smithfield, and pedestrians would get blasts of hot, stinking air through street-level gratings since animals were often kept and killed below ground.15 Passersby glancing left or right into a court or yard where a butcher worked could find themselves witnessing a killing. It was alleged by various witnesses before the 1828 Select Committee on Smithfield that sheep were often skinned before being completely dead; it was observed that an unskilled slaughterman could require up to ten blows with an axe to kill a bullock; and while an inspector was supposed to be notified before the slaughter of any horse, the rule was said to be broken more often than kept, and horses were observed up to their knees in the weltering remains of their fellow creatures, maimed and starving and showing obvious signs of distress as their fate dawned on them.16

  George Cruikshank’s The Knackers Yard; or, The Horse’s Last Home, 1830, shows the appalling conditions in slaughterhouses.

  The cruelty that was meted out to creatures in Smithfield was quite apparent to the passerby. While a goad on the end of a drover or market man’s rod or staff was supposed to be no longer than one-eighth of an inch, many were longer and were seen being used on the head, eyes, genitals, and shins of animals that were standing perfectly still; the “wake them” beatings just before daylight in winter were said to be particularly vicious. In the marketplace, cattle were arranged in “drove rings”—circles of around fifteen; nose in, tail out—and were kept in that formation by beatings. Hundreds of cows and bullocks stood crowded together in this way in the wide paved area just to the northwest of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital; this section was criss-crossed by pathways for pedestrians, with only a wooden handrail between beast and bypasser.17 Walking this route was a challenge, given the slippery Smithfield terrain and especially so in the “black frosts of November.”18 That Smithfield was often brighter by night than by day was confirmed by a witness before the Select Committee, who said that in winter the handheld lamps of the drovers and the street gas lamps meant that selling could continue after dusk fell in the afternoon. The newspaper columnist who wrote under the pseudonym Aleph, remembering the Smithfield of the 1820s, recalled that “if the day was foggy (and there were more foggy days then than now) then the glaring lights of the drover-boys’ torches added to the wild confusion.… The long horns of the Spanish breeds … made it a far from pleasant experience for a nervous man to venture along one of these narrow lanes, albeit it was the nearest and most direct way across the open market.”19 Road traffic continued to travel across the quarter-mile stretch between the top of Giltspur Street and the southern end of St. John Street, and collisions with animals were common; beatings were used to move beasts out of the way of carts, coaches, and carriages, but hindquarters were frequently hit by passing vehicles.

  * * *

  The common, all too visible brutality at Smithfield was to prove a major impetus in securing the world’s first legally enforceable animal-protection measures. In April 1800, a motion had been defeated in Parliament to ban bullbaiting and cockfighting; in 1809, a more broadly defined anti–animal cruelty bill was also defeated, though it had progressed farther than its predecessor before being lost. In May 1821, a similar bill was passed in the Commons but lost in the Lords; and then, in May 1822, a Bill to Prevent Cruelty to Horses, Cattle and Donkeys was passed by both Commons and Lords, gaining royal assent in July of that year. It was always to be known as Martin’s Act, after its mover, Colonel Richard Martin, MP for Galway.20 Martin was popularly known as Humanity Dick, a nickname thought to have been given to him by George IV, with whom he was friendly, despite the king’s love of hunting and cockfighting.21 He was also called Hair-Trigger Dick because of his overexcitability and his readiness to fight duels (he killed no one but inflicted and received a number of gunshot wounds). Martin was nearly seventy when his act was passed, but he was tireless in his drive to seek out brutality to animals and drag offenders before the magistrates; within a year of the act’s becoming law, 150 people were prosecuted in police courts for cruelty. Martin lived, like many other MPs of the day, in Manchester Buildings, a court of rented rooms on the river next to Westminster Bridge, and was often to be seen parading Whitehall and Charing Cross Road inspecting cabmen’s behavior and the condition of their horses.22 A contemporary described him as “a meteor of ubiquity” who appeared to be all over London at the same time, ferreting out and exposing the ill treatment of animals.

  The first prosecution to be brought under his novel piece of legislation came about after Martin paid a visit to the Friday horse market at Smithfield and secured the arrest of Samuel Clarke and David Hyde. Clarke was a horse dealer who had repeatedly struck a horse on the head with the handle of his whip to make it look more lively as it stood tethered to a rail; Hyde had severely beaten a horse as he was riding it, for the same reason. Both men were fined twenty shillings each. (The minimum fine was ten shillings, the maximum five pounds or up to two months in jail.) Martin also undertook a citizen’s arrest of a Smithfield butcher whom he saw breaking the leg of a sheep; Martin forcibly pulled the man away, even though a gang of drovers appeared on the scene and threatened him. He gave eyewitness evidence at the successful prosecution of a Smithfield dealer who regularly flung calves into a van with their legs tied together and cords around their necks; the creatures piled on top of one another and many suffocated. (In his defense, the dealer said that, if he was not allowed to do his job the way he saw fit, “gentlefolk would get no veal.”)23

  Martin was particularly alarmed at the use of vivisection in medical research. During the 1825 House of Commons debate on a bill that would broaden the scope of Martin’s Act, the member for Galway told the House how the French anatomist François Magendie (“this surgical butcher, or butchering surgeon,” Martin called him) had, on a visit to London, bought a greyhound for ten guineas (the going rate for a dead human) and nailed the dog’s paws and ears to an operating table and dissected its facial and cranial nerves one by one, severing its senses of taste, then of hearing, and announcing that he would perform a live vivisection the next day—if the dog was still alive.24

  Within the medical community, many London surgeons voiced their opposition to vivisection—in public, at least. The great John (“Fear God, and keep your bowels open”) Abernethy saw little value in such research, believing that observation, not experiment, was the key to ph
ysiological knowledge; whenever Abernethy did investigate animal anatomy, he insisted the beast be killed quickly and humanely before dissection. Sir Charles Bell, the eminent physiologist, believed there was little of use to humans to be learned from exploring animal physiology, and he had moral scruples, too: “I cannot perfectly convince myself that I am authorised in nature or religion to do these crudities,” he wrote in a letter to his brother George in 1822. Elsewhere Bell wrote: “Experiments have never been the means of discovery; and a survey of what has been attempted in late years in physiology will prove that the opening of living animals has done more to perpetuate error than to confirm the just views taken from the study of anatomy and natural motions.” To which Magendie, who was determined to fathom the mysteries of muscle movement, particularly that of the facial muscles, replied: “One should not say that to perform physiological experiments one must necessarily have a heart of stone and a leaning towards cruelty.”25 In 1824, before a crowd of physicians, Magendie severed part of the brain of a dog, which fell down, stood up, ran around, then died.

  Edinburgh’s Dr. Knox, purchaser of Burke and Hare’s produce, was another who preferred to work on humans: “I have, all my life, had a natural horror for experiments made on living animals, nor has more matured reason altered my feelings with regard to these vivisections.… A minute and careful anatomy, aided by observation of the numerous experiments made by nature and accident on man himself, seems to me to present infinitely the best and surest basis for physiological and pathological science.”26

  Humanity Dick was never able to bring an action against a vivisectionist; his attempts to pass such a measure failed in Parliament. But in pursuing cases of ordinary, everyday cruelty, he became legendary, and his London court appearances—as prosecutor—often found him in front of George Rowland Minshull, who obtained many contributions to the courtroom swear box (proceeds to the poor) as a result of Martin’s endless stream of exasperated “By God”s and “Oh God”s. The two men seem to have enjoyed a part-jocular, part-peevish series of exchanges in the mid-1820s, such as this, at Bow Street. Minshull had suggested that a man could judge for himself how much chastisement his own horse might require, to which Martin called out, “By God, if a man is to be the judge in his own case, there is an end of everything!”

  “I fine you five shillings for swearing,” said Minshull.

  “I’ll pay up,” said Martin.

  “No, I was joking,” said Minshull, who went on to acquit the defendant, who had been charged with cruelty to a horse. Martin was furious, quoting Macbeth (and shouting): “Time has been, that when the brains were out, the man would die,” as he leapt across the courtroom to make his point.

  “My brains may be out,” said Minshull, “but I cannot make up my mind to convict in this case.”

  “Then it is time that you were relieved from the labours of your office!”

  “Well that was a very kind and gentlemanly remark, I must say,” said Minshull, “but I am going to keep my temper, whatever you do, and I dismiss the case.” And Martin flounced out.27

  Martin was determined to extend his 1822 anticruelty act to protect all animals, including domestic pets, to ban bull- and badgerbaiting, cock- and dogfighting, and to improve conditions in abattoirs. He failed to get further bills passed in 1823, twice in 1824, three times in 1825, and three times in 1826. On 16 June 1824, the day after the loss of Martin’s Slaughtering of Horses Bill (an attempt to force slaughterhouse owners to keep horses well fed while they awaited death), a meeting took place at the inappropriately named Old Slaughter’s Coffee House.28 The Friends of the Bill for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals resolved to become a more permanent body, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (to be given its “Royal” prefix by Victoria in 1840). Those assembled pledged to redouble their efforts to police the behavior of cabmen and drovers and to publish tracts and write letters to the great and good on why mistreating brute beasts was immoral. Such activities could take time: one Charles Merritt told the 1828 Select Committee on Smithfield that it had taken him the best part of a day to get a drover’s boy arrested for injuring a bullock in Oxford Street. A growing number of anticruelty campaigners took to patrolling Smithfield, reflecting a growing passion for personal intervention in the face of the apparent unwillingness or inability of the constables appointed by the Corporation of London to police Smithfield Market effectively. (The Metropolitan Police had no jurisdiction in Smithfield; not until 1839 did the City exchange its parochial constables for a body modeled on the Met.) Eight to ten constables were supposed to be on hand at any time during the day, but there were frequent complaints that officers were never to be found or, if found, would do little to act against a cruel drover.29

  Shifts in attitudes toward animal cruelty had wide-ranging implications. Opposition to the 1800 and 1809 anticruelty bills had largely focused on two issues. First, it was felt to be a gross infringement of liberty for a man to be prohibited from doing as he saw fit with his property—living property included (the same reason that, short of murder, a man could do as he pleased with his wife). Undue interference in private lives was to be avoided as far as possible (though some private lives were considered more worthy of protection than others). Martin’s Act cleverly got around the freedom-of-the-individual objection by framing the legislation to apply to those who had charge of a beast; its result, though, was a crackdown on workingmen, who merely had charge—not ownership—of horses, cattle, and donkeys. Second, there was doctrinal objection to animal protection, at least when the Lords came to debate the measure. Why should animals be considered the equal of man when he was given dominion over every living thing that moves upon the earth? The concept of an animal’s having feelings and legal rights was seen as yet one more eccentric notion held by Methodists, Quakers, Baptists, Evangelicals, and other nonconformists who made up a large and vocal part of the anticruelty lobby.30 Many of Martin’s supporters conflated their attacks on animal cruelty with opposition to ancient aristocratic privilege and to arcane, outmoded civil processes and institutions, and many different threads of protest were to be interlinked in the literature of animal-cruelty campaigners. The 1823 Cursory Remarks on the Evil Tendency of Unrestrained Cruelty pamphlet, for example, worked itself up into a purple passage eliding all manner of social ills perpetrated in unreformed, aristocratically misruled Britain: “Man has the vanity, the preposterous arrogance, to fancy himself the only worthy object of divine regard; and in proportion as he fancies himself such, considers himself authorised to despise, oppress, and torment all the creatures which he regards as his inferiors … and thus the proud and voluptuous in the higher ranks of society too often regard the humble and laborious classes as beings of a different cast, with whom it would be degrading familiarity to associate, and whom, whenever they interfere with their pleasures, their interest, or caprice, they may persecute, oppress and imprison. [This last was a reference to the Vagrancy Act, then being debated in Parliament.] … Thus men in the lowest stations become, in their turn, the persecutors and tormentors of the brute creation, of creatures which they regard as inferiors.” The chain of evil passed downward from the aristocracy to Smithfield, where the cattle appeared to take on Christlike attributes, exhibiting, according to Cursory Remarks, “the most patient endurance of every kind of persecution” and having “a harmless, unresisting, uncomplaining nature.”31

  Impassioned rhetoric such as this, combined with zealous personal intervention, appeared to be winning the day. Humanitarianism was becoming attractive to those seeking a new respectability—those who felt themselves on the verge of getting the vote—and increasing support was being shown for moves that would distance the new industrial/mercantile age from a past perceived as barbarous. Some of the more obvious excesses were being eradicated by legislation: the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, and the ownership of slaves in 1833; the use of child labor began to diminish with the passing of the first Factory Act in 1833.
The Bloody Code was crumbling: the burning of female felons ended in 1790; hanging, drawing, and quartering was abolished in 1814; the last beheadings were in 1820; the stocks, the whip, the pillory, and the gibbet would all fall idle by 1837. (London’s last set of stocks would stand disused for many years in Portugal Street, James May’s former haunt.) One of the last public whippings in London took place in 1829, when a thirteen-year-old boy was flogged for 150 yards while tied to the end of a moving cart for stealing a pair of shoes; though no one attempted his rescue, the crowd that gathered was vocal in its opposition.32 The old was becoming repugnant, and Smithfield offended on many levels; everything about the place stood in direct opposition to the impulses of those bent on reforming, modernizing, cleansing, ordering, making open and visible. The very topography of “this old field of cruelty” appeared to modern eyes to embody and perpetuate the sins of ages past.33 Until the middle of the thirteenth century, a small wooded section of the Smoothe Field called the Elms, which lay between today’s Cowcross and Charterhouse streets, had been the place of public execution. In 1542, Henry VIII devised the spectacle of the boiling to death of offenders, to take place in Smithfield (one of his kitchen staff, who had been accused of poisoning, died in a vat, slowly, in this way; a serving woman met the same fate the following year). In the next decade, Mary Tudor had forty-five Protestants burned close to the gates of St. Bartholomew the Great, and her sister, Elizabeth I, sent Catholics to the flames. Two centuries later, the convoluted lanes running around Turnmill Street, West Street, Field Lane, Saffron Hill, Cowcross, and other thoroughfares near the Fleet were colloquially known as Jack Ketch’s Warren, after the seventeenth-century executioner; the Warren was where gallows fodder hid from the law and bred new sinners. These festering piles of wooden buildings cut off the south from the north, while the higgledy-piggledy, queer, and quaint alleys and courts, with their antique names (Black Boy Alley, Swan Inn Yard, Bread Court), were increasingly seen as harboring immorality, criminality, disease, and civil unrest—right in the heart of the wealthiest city in the world.34 The sinuosity and complexity of the Warren confounded those who attempted to enter and investigate these ancient spaces: to the horror of one surveyor and public health campaigner, Frying Pan Alley, off Turnmill Street, was found to be twenty feet long but just two feet wide.35