The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  * * *

  Joseph Sadler Thomas was never able to capitalize on the recognition he gained from his role in the Bishop and Williams investigation. Despite the eulogies that appeared in all the newspapers praising the New Police as a body, and Thomas as an individual officer, for securing the conviction of the London Burkers, his enemies never ceased to pillory him, and he was singled out for criticism for “high-handedness” during the Coldbath Fields Riot of 13 May 1833. This meeting of three hundred members of the National Union of the Working Class and their supporters took place on a large stretch of open ground just behind Coldbath Fields Prison and was broken up by an equal number of badly organized and belligerent Metropolitan Police officers, who managed to turn a good-humored gathering into a general brawl, with one fatality—a police officer’s.

  But it was a more petty row that sealed Thomas’s fate. Just after the Coldbath Fields Riot, he was accused of victimizing a publican called Williams who had applied for a pub license in Seven Dials, Covent Garden. Thomas opposed the license, saying that there were already thirty pubs within 150 yards of Williams’s proposed venue, and Thomas was one of fifty local residents who signed a petition to limit the number of pubs in the area. Two magistrates (one of whom, Rotch, loathed the New Police, and Thomas in particular) complained to the Home Office about Thomas’s antipathy to Williams’s license application, and at the justices’ behest, Thomas was suspended from the Metropolitan Police for five weeks until the commissioners themselves intervened and apologized to Thomas for this overreaction.

  Thomas felt that he had been humiliated once too often “in a neighbourhood where I had been for 20 years with an unpolluted character”; he would, he said, “as well have met my death” than endure the disgrace of suspension.4 On 22 July 1833, he resigned from the Metropolitan Police and with his wife and three children moved north, becoming deputy constable of Manchester’s “old police” and among the first of Manchester’s “new” Borough Police Force, when this Met-style organization was set up in 1839. His salary—six hundred pounds per annum—was three times his Covent Garden pay.

  He did not stay long with the new force, however; his health deteriorated, and for the last two years of his life he was unable to work and was supported by a public subscription—a vote of thanks from many in Manchester who had appreciated his work as a constable. He died in October 1841.

  * * *

  Herbert Mayo was fired by King’s College in 1836 for his poor teaching skills, though he went on to cofound the successful Middlesex Hospital anatomy school. By 1842 he was crippled by osteoarthritis and moved to the German spa town of Bad Weilbach, where he became increasingly mystical, publishing such works as On the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions (1849). He was also intrigued by phrenology and physiognomy, and his medical writing now appeared to have more in common with the Tudor theory of the humors than with the brave new world of anatomy and physiology, in which latter field he had once been such a brilliant pioneer. Typical observations from Mayo’s later years were that sanguine people tend to have red hair and to respond well to being bled, that Italians are bilious or melancholic and have olive complexions, and that cards, angling, and chess are excellent defenses against insanity (from The Philosophy of Living, 1837). He died in a German hydropathic hotel in 1852.

  Richard Partridge failed to fulfill his potential. Though he succeeded Mayo as King’s College’s professor of anatomy in 1836, he never ceased to be nervous as a surgeon and maintained a stolid, unremarkable role as teacher and anatomical draftsman. In 1862, he had the honor to inspect, before a number of onlookers, the injured foot of Italian patriot and freedom fighter Giuseppe Garibaldi. He failed to spot a bullet lodged in Garibaldi’s ankle; another surgeon approached and located and removed the bullet straightaway. Partridge’s reputation never recovered, and he died in poverty eleven years later.

  While lecturing at King’s College, Partridge would tell his students the Bishop and Williams story, embellishing it with the fiction that the convictions had been secured when the New Police had placed cheese on the floor of 3 Nova Scotia Gardens and a number of little white mice had crept out of hiding to nibble it, thereby proving that the Italian boy had been killed in the house.

  Thomas Williams was pledged to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital museum, though he does not appear in the nineteenth-century catalogs of that institution, and his whereabouts are unknown. The remains of John Bishop maintained a moderate profile for much of the century: his skeleton and the skin of his arms had pride of place in King’s College’s pathological museum for decades. In 1871, however, he was spotted in a private moneymaking concern, Dr. Kahn’s Anatomical Museum, near Leicester Square in the West End; either King’s had decided to sell their once-famous prize or Dr. Kahn was deceiving the public with an imitation John Bishop among his display of Siamese twin fetuses, harelips, hemorrhoids, hernias, “the dreadful effects of lacing stays too tightly,” plus plenty of oddly formed genitals, displayed “for medical gentlemen only.”5

  Richard Partridge’s disastrous examination of Garibaldi in 1862; the anatomist’s career did not recover.

  But the London Burker has not taken up his rightful place in a glass cabinet alongside 1820s boxing promoter turned killer John Thurtell, the “Red Barn murderer” William Corder, and other long-forgotten villains in the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons, though it is possible that he was once there and that his remains perished in the same Luftwaffe direct hit that destroyed many items in the museum in May 1941, including the skeleton of Chunee the elephant and the (alleged) intestine of Napoleon Bonaparte.

  * * *

  So much for the actors; as for the location, Nova Scotia Gardens acquired a new sobriquet, Burkers Hole, by which it would be known for the next twenty-five years. A myth arose that the cottages communicated with one another via a warren of cellars and subterranean passages—a vivid image of how London’s criminal fraternity were felt to be able to move around unseen along secret pathways of their own making. In the 1840s Nova Scotia Gardens was one of the slums traversed by such sanitary reformers as George Godwin, Henry Austin (Charles Dickens’s brother-in-law), and Dr. Hector Gavin. Godwin, in 1859, decided that “an artistic traveller, looking at the huge mountain of refuse which had been collected, might have fancied that Arthur’s Seat at Edinburgh, or some other monster picturesque crag, had suddenly come into view, and the dense smell which hung over the ‘gardens’ would have aided in bringing ‘auld reekie’ strongly to the memory. At the time of our visit, the summit of the mount was thronged with various figures, which were seen in strong relief against the sky; and boys and girls were amusing themselves by running down and toiling up the least precipitous side of it. Near the base, a number of women were arranged in a row, sifting and sorting the various materials placed before them. The tenements were in a miserable condition. Typhus fever, we learnt from a medical officer, was a frequent visitor all round the spot.” “Refuse” was Godwin’s euphemism for human feces; Gavin described the same scene as “a table mountain of manure,” which towered over “a lake of more liquid dung.”6 A refuse collector was using Nova Scotia Gardens as his official tip, accumulating this vast mound from which the still-destitute residents of that part of Bethnal Green came to salvage some sort of living. So much for the New Poor Law: people chose to live off, and play on, noxious rubbish tips rather than enter the workhouse.

  Half a century later a nostalgia column, “Chapters of Old Shore-ditch,” in the local newspaper, the Hackney Express and Shoreditch Observer, featured an aged local resident’s eyewitness memory of “the fearful hovels … once so famous in the days of Burking,… a row of dilapidated old houses standing back from the line of frontage and in a hollow, with a strip of waste land in front, on which was laid out for sale flowers, greengrocery and old rubbish of all kinds”; the following week another contributor recalled “the antiquated property known as The Hackney Road Hollow.”7

  Royalty, too, came to gawk a
t the natives; Princess Mary Adelaide, duchess of Teck—granddaughter of George III and mother-in-law to the future George V—recalled of the Gardens: “There was a large piece of waste ground covered in places with foul, slimy-looking pools, amid which crowds of half-naked, barefooted, ragged children chased one another. From the centre arose a great black mound.… The stench continually issuing from the enormous mass of decaying matter was unendurable.”8 But the most important visitor to these fetid regions was Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906), heiress, philanthropist, baroness (from 1871), and, for two decades, close friend of Charles Dickens. Together, she and the novelist would take long night walks to some of the “vilest dens of London” during the 1840s and 1850s; and from time to time Nova Scotia Gardens, “the resort of murderers, thieves, the disreputable and abandoned,” featured on their East End itinerary, according to Mary Spencer-Warren, author of the only press interview that Burdett-Coutts ever gave.9

  Architectural/sanitary campaigner George Godwin discovered a mountain of rubbish and sewage when he visited Nova Scotia Gardens in 1859; this sketch appeared in his campaigning book Town Swamps and Social Bridges.

  No documentary evidence survives to reveal whether it was Dickens or Burdett-Coutts who first suggested Nova Scotia Gardens as a destination. But Burdett-Coutts’s link to Burkers Hole was striking indeed. Her grandfather Thomas Coutts, founder of the bank Coutts & Co., had died in 1822, leaving his £900,000 fortune to his second wife, actress Harriot Mellon, who, in 1827, married the duke of St. Albans and became even richer. Her mother dead, and with no close female relative, Angela spent weeks, even months, with her adored stepgrandmother in Harriot’s Highgate villa, Holly Lodge. Harriot, who was spoken of fondly by, among others, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, and poet laureate Robert Southey, had a quick wit, a deep purse, and a very kind heart, perhaps too kind. “Her charities were abused and misapplied by too many of the thankless wretches who had partaken of her bounty,” according to one who knew her.10 One of the many local people whom Harriot tried to help out, in 1816, was the pregnant young Highgate widow Sarah Bishop. It is known that at the time of the Bishop and Williams case, Angela, then seventeen, was living with Harriot; had she perhaps heard background details of the case from her sprightly hostess?

  Harriot died in August 1837 and left her fortune to twenty-three-year-old Angela. (She had intended to leave it to Lord Dudley Stuart, who, in 1834, had been so indignant when two Italian boys were arrested outside his home, but Harriot had cut him out of her will when he went against her advice and married the niece of Napoleon Bonaparte.) Possibly inspired by Harriot’s kindness, but determined to be more discriminating in her giving, Angela set out upon a lifetime of philanthropy, which she conducted according to both her religious principles and the dominant social ideals of the midcentury. Dickens, while their friendship endured, from 1839 to 1859, was to be one of her mentors as she struggled to transcend the limits of her outlook and experience.

  In 1852, Angela bought Nova Scotia Gardens for £8,700. She intended to raze the cottages and in their place build salubrious homes that would lead to the moral, spiritual, and physical improvement of the dwellers of Burkers Hole. But she had not been informed that the refuse collector was legally entitled to stay on the land, no matter who owned it, and to use it as he saw fit until 1859. It was only in that year that she was able to set about her grand project. She employed architect Henry Darbishire to create Columbia Square, a magnificent five-story block of one-, two-, and three-room apartments, housing 180 families who paid the affordable sum of between 2s 6d and 5s a week in rent; there were shared washing facilities and WCs on each floor, and a library, club room, and play areas. Before long, there was a waiting list of families keen to move into the apartments.

  Columbia Square was an odd amalgam of industrial-style tenements onto which were grafted Gothic Revival pinnacles and pointed arches; plain yellow stock bricks were dressed with portland stone and terra-cotta moldings. What followed next was even more exotic: Columbia Market, built just to the west of the square between 1863 and 1869, was a Castle Perilous extravaganza that included thirty-six shops and four hundred market stalls for local traders and produce sellers. It looked like a miniature cathedral and came complete with pieties painted on the walls, such as “Speak everyman truth unto his neighbour,” and orders forbidding swearing, drunkenness, and Sunday trading. It went bust within six months.

  The baroness’s housing continued to be popular for nearly a hundred years, but Columbia Square was finally condemned as unfit for human habitation in the 1950s; the market died alongside it when Henry Darbishire’s masterpieces fell to the demolition ball in 1960. A local authority housing estate, still in use, was built on the site. The Birdcage pub opposite has watched all this, unscathed.

  Philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts built Columbia Market (top) and Columbia Square on the site of Nova Scotia Gardens in the 1860s.

  * * *

  The Bishop and Williams case itself began a slow decline into obscurity, a number of factors combining to push the London Burkers into the shadows. The “Asiatic cholera” had entered the country at Sunderland in August 1831; it reached London in February 1832 and by the summer had killed an estimated thirty-two thousand people in Britain, fifty-five hundred of them Londoners. The fear of urban miasma—the exhalations of graveyards and the stinking, sluggish air in courts, alleys, and warrens that were (mistakenly) blamed for the outbreak—quickly pushed “Burkiphoby” from its top billing. The bacillus cholera vibrio could kill within hours of being ingested in food or, more frequently, in drinking water, where it could live for up to a fortnight—all of which would remain unknown until the 1850s and not fully accepted by the medical community until the 1880s. A typhus epidemic struck London in 1837–38, while cholera revisited London in 1848–49 (killing fifteen thousand), 1853–54, and 1866–67. It was the air of London—its smells, mists, fogs, smoke—rather than its criminal element that held a mysterious terror for the city’s inhabitants and visitors in the 1830s.

  Besides, Burke and Hare were continuing to do perfectly good duty as archetypal murderers for dissection. The story of the Edinburgh Horrors had charming, voluble Burke, hideous, cretinous Hare; sinister, proud Dr. Knox, pathetic Daft Jamie, and alluring Mary Paterson. And from the mid-1830s, a new era of complex and exciting murders was ushered in, reported by an increasingly sophisticated newspaper and periodical press that could now reproduce high-quality illustrations of scenes of crime and dramatis personae. An ever more literate population wanted to read about people of quality (professionals, many of them) murdering one another in drawing rooms, boudoirs, hotel rooms; they preferred their killers and victims to be able to express themselves at great length in letters; they wanted—and got—swindlers and frauds, adulterers and adulteresses; bigamists, usurped heirs, jealous spouses, all pursued, from August 1842, by the specialist Detective Branch of Scotland Yard, the first permanent plainclothes squad.

  Bishop and Williams crop up toward the end of the century in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72), chapter 50, when the rector’s gossipy wife, Mrs. Cadwallader, says snobbishly of the book’s heroine, Dorothea Brooke, that she “might as well marry an Italian with white mice” as marry Will Ladislaw, and thereby lose her fortune. Middlemarch is set in 1829–32, and partly concerns the efforts of the idealistic young doctor Tertius Lydgate to found a new hospital in the town. Mrs. Cadwallader’s remark is a wholly contemporary reference to the London Burkers and to the scandal that doctors could find themselves linked to.

  Before that, though, the killers had provided inspiration for one of the midcentury’s biggest-selling works of fiction. In 1844, journalist George William MacArthur Reynolds (1814–79), a bankrupt Radical and teetotaler, read an English translation of the French popular literary sensation Les Mystères de Paris (1842), written by Eugène Sue, and immediately hit on the idea of a British imitation. Reynolds’s The Mysteries of London was published between October 1844 and 1856
in weekly issues, at the low price of one pence to attract the working-class reader.11 Those who were unable to afford a penny a week for fiction or who were illiterate could nevertheless enjoy the stories since literate members of the community would read aloud to groups of twelve or so in a tavern or some other public space. Reynolds’s tales are said to have outsold every other rival serial and novel, with thirty to forty thousand copies a week printed at the height of their popularity; in 1846, three different stage adaptations could be seen in London.

  The Mysteries of London is a vast, rambling series of interconnecting episodes in which two brothers, Richard Markham, the hero, and his dissolute brother, Eugene, the villain, endure various adventures. In the course of the plot, the misdeeds of a corrupt, enervated aristocratic elite are juxtaposed with the depredations of London’s underworld characters, and the most important of the latter, occupying the dark heart of the book, is the Resurrection Man.

  The Resurrection Man lives in Bethnal Green, in a squalid, damp house that has an eight-room dungeon beneath it, accessed by the pull of a lever near the hearth. A small alley runs alongside the house, and late one night the Resurrection Man is observed with another man in the alley—they are dragging between them a blindfolded woman, who never emerges alive from the Resurrection Man’s cellar. His favorite drinking places are the Dark House at the northern end of Brick Lane (not far from Nova Scotia Gardens) and the Boozing Ken on Saffron Hill; he serves time in Coldbath Fields; he disinters a girl’s body from beneath the flagstones of Shoreditch Church. The Mysteries opens in July 1831—a very specific time, though its significance is not explained to the reader; perhaps it is coincidence, but this is the month in which Bishop and Williams first met. In the series’ opening scene, a youth becomes lost in the maze of alleys near the Fleet Ditch, then, trapped in a rotting hovel called “The Old House in Smithfield,” he is flung by two men through a trapdoor into a well that empties into the Fleet.