The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  Though the Anatomy Act had finally killed off the trade by 1844, resurrection, it seems, remained a potent folk memory, a fact that Reynolds was keen to play on in his choice of bogeyman, who in the course of The Mysteries is stabbed, blown up, imprisoned, and left for dead on a plague ship but who nevertheless returns to stalk the hero of the book.

  Reynolds’s story also cleverly capitalized on the deeper physical strata of London that were being unearthed in the mid-1840s, with the so-called Metropolitan Improvements—new roads, railway lines, bridges, tunnels, and the laying of drains. The discoveries made during these works revealed some uncanny facts about the old fabric of the city and fed into a particularly urban paranoia about subterranean spaces—the sort of anxiety that created the legend that Nova Scotia Gardens was sitting atop a warren of passages connecting the cottages. In 1837, a Parliamentary Select Committee convened to examine the feasibility of bricking over the Fleet River and converting it into a sewer revealed that the neighborhood of Saffron Hill, close to Smithfield, featured a great many manholes leading to shafts twenty to thirty feet deep into which a person could descend below the level of the street. These had never been properly mapped or charted before, and, along with the Fleet and its fetid tributaries, were being investigated as possible miasmatic sources of the cholera and typhus outbreaks.12 In 1844, as part of these same belated improvements, Farringdon Road was built through the slums around the Fleet, and to the thrilling horror of nonlocals, the Old Red Lion Tavern at 3 West Street, Smithfield, was discovered to have been a warrenlike house, hollowed out and customized to hide booty and prisoners on the run; it featured secret passages, trapdoors, subterranean rooms, sliding panels, and escape routes into other houses or onto the slimy banks of the Fleet. The building dated back to 1683 and was also known locally as the Old House in West Street and Jonathan Wild’s House, after the notorious magistrate-cum-thief hanged in 1725. Sightseers paid to be taken on tours of the house and the remains of the semidemolished streets around Saffron Hill, Field Lane/West Street, Turnmill Street, Cowcross. A similarly uncanny honeycomb of rotting old houses and convoluted streets was discovered in the same year when St. Giles, near Covent Garden, was razed for the building of New Oxford Street and, in the following year, when Victoria Street was constructed through the Devil’s Acre slums in Westminster.

  In 1844, sightseers lined up to visit the soon to be demolished Old Red Lion Tavern in Smithfield (above) and its warren of passages and hidden chambers. It had been built on the banks of the filthy Fleet, from which people scavenged a living (overleaf, top) and above which were cheap lodging houses for the poor (overleaf, bottom).

  The Metropolitan Improvements revealed that some of the worst imaginings by “respectable” Londoners about criminal enclaves and about how their topography assisted wrongdoers to evade justice had been accurate in substance as well as in spirit. But by then, the moves to sweep away the rottenness of previous ages had gathered unstoppable momentum, and the recent past was feeling as ancient as biblical times.

  Notes

  I have based the narrative of the case on the Times’s reports of the inquest, committal proceedings, and trial of Bishop, May, and Williams, supplemented by reports from the other main national newspapers whenever these give additional information or direct quotations; the printed Old Bailey Sessions Papers of 1831 filled in gaps in the newspapers’ reports of the murder trial.

  Few original records exist of proceedings at London’s magistrates courts in the late 1820s and early 1830s, and I have had to rely heavily on newspaper accounts of summary justice.

  The reports of Parliamentary Select Committees have proved a rich source of evidence about street life in London in the 1820s and 1830s, though doubtless these are somewhat bowdlerized accounts, and they do not, generally, encompass the views of the poor themselves; nevertheless, fascinating snippets creep into much of the witnesses’ testimony.

  Chapter One: Suspiciously Fresh

  1. Times, 9 November 1831.

  2. The Morning Advertiser reports the boy’s name as Giacomo Montrato; but its cloth-eared reporter also calls Shields “Sheen” until quite late in the case; Shiel is a variant the Globe and Traveller and the Morning Herald used. The name Paragalli went through many transcriptions, as did all the Italian names mentioned in the case; even the Times and the Old Bailey trial reports contain wild variations on the Italian witnesses’ names.

  Liquorpond Street now lies under the line of Clerkenwell Road, running east from Gray’s Inn Road.

  3. West Street was also called Chick Lane and led into Smithfield. Torn down in 1844, it followed roughly the line that Charterhouse Street traces today.

  4. This phrase puzzled lawyers and reporters covering the case and was widely transcribed as “to locus or burke me.” To “burke” is to kill by the method used by William Burke. “Hocus” was contemporary slang for alcohol to which a drug—usually opium in its liquid form, laudanum—had been added, and to hocus was to stupefy someone with such a concoction before robbing him or her. To “locus” was slang for spiriting someone away after getting him drunk. “Locust,” meanwhile, was a slang term for laudanum; and “locus-ale,” beer containing laudanum, is referred to as early as 1693, according to A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English by Eric Partridge (1937).

  5. For example, “to topper his smellers” was Regency slang, meaning to land a punch on an opponent’s nose. From Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang.

  6. Rum-hot was a variant of “egg-hot”—strong ale brought to the boil with sugar, cinnamon, and a little lemon juice, to which was added a glass of cold ale; this mixture was then poured over beaten egg yolks, with nutmeg and more sugar added to taste. Some preferred to heat it by thrusting a hot poker into the mixture and making it bubble (The Curiosities of Ale and Beer by John Bickerdyke [1886]).

  7. The Globe and Traveller of Saturday, 26 November, reported this conversation as: “What do you think of our new one now? Isn’t he a staunch one? Didn’t he go up to him well? You stick to me old fellow and I’ll be true to you. I know the other one is all right—he is a good ’un. I told you he was a staunch one.” The Globe and Traveller reported May’s reply to Bishop as: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘It’s all right.’”

  8. The 1824 Hackney Coach Directory by James Quaife.

  9. In the Morning Advertiser of 9 November 1831, May’s reply to Hill is reported as: “That is nothing to you or us. Here it is, and that’s all about it.”

  10. St. Giles-in-the-Fields is Henry Flitcroft’s 1731 church in St. Giles High Street, beneath today’s Centrepoint. St. Mary’s Moorfields stood on the north corner of Blomfield Street and Finsbury Circus between 1820 and 1899; it had a small cemetery as well as burial vaults beneath the church, and it is possible Shields was stealing more than silverware.

  11. Public Record Office, Petitions and Pardons 1830–31, HO64/2.

  Chapter Two: Persons Unknown

  1. The bishop of London’s figures as given in the pamphlet Evidence of the Reverend William Stone, Rector of Christ Church Spitalfields, and Others as to the Operation of Voluntary Charities (1833).

  2. This is the number given for private schools in 1832 by historian M. J. Durey in the essay “Bodysnatchers and Benthamites” (1976). However, this figure is unlikely to include many far smaller enterprises, such as those private courses given by hospital surgeons from their own homes; Dr. C. Walker, for example, gave classes in midwifery at his lodgings at 93 Bartholomew Close, and Dr. Ryan gave lectures on medical jurisprudence at his rooms in Hatton Garden. Source: advertisements in the Lancet in the late 1820s.

  3. Morning Advertiser, 16 October 1827.

  4. A variety of views on the number of corpses required for teaching purposes were given by surgeons in their evidence to the Select Committee on Anatomy in 1828, and three per student is the average that was settled on by the Select Committee Report’s authors (Report, p. 4).

  5. Over two hundred offenses were punishable
by death in 1800; by 1837, the figure had dropped to eight. Still capital in 1831 were treason, murder, attempted murder causing injury, rape, sodomy, forgery, several forms of counterfeiting, horse stealing, housebreaking with larceny, returning from a sentence of transportation, sacrilege, stealing letters, stealing goods worth five shillings or more from a shop and five pounds or more from a private house.

  6. Report and Evidence of the Select Committee into the State of the Police of the Metropolis, 1828, pp. 284–85, and the same committee’s report of 1833.

  7. Times, 9 April 1830.

  8. Globe and Traveller, 19 October 1831. Williams gave his name as William Jones—which was the name of a noted east London snatcher (see n. 12 below).

  9. Morning Advertiser, 30 December 1828.

  10. Quaint Signs of Olde Inns by G. J. Monson-Fitzjohn (1926). But William West in his Tavern Anecdotes (1825)—a compendium of London inns and pubs—guesses that the Fortune of War was named after a prizefighter who retired with his winnings to open a pub.

  The Lancet points out that there was a small theater of anatomy—a private medical school—at 18 Giltspur Street, though, perhaps surprisingly, this does not feature in our story. Nor does the Giltspur Street Compter, a small jail at the southern end of the street, opposite Newgate, that held many convicted under the Vagrancy Act.

  A version of the Golden Boy still dangles from the office block that stands on the site today.

  11. Evidence of retired parish constable James Glennon given to the 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy (Report, p. 105).

  12. In January 1830, at Lambeth Street police office in Whitechapel, Cornelius Fitzgerald, George Gibson, and George and William Kent were discharged when they appeared on a charge of attempting to rob the burial ground at Globe Lane, Bethnal Green, since they had been arrested on suspicion only and no other evidence was offered.

  In April 1830, at Union Hall police office, Southwark, resurrectionists complained of increased police vigilance at graveyards during the hearing of a pair named Williams and Edwards, who were arrested at St. John’s, West Lane, Walworth; it is possible they were members of the gang so determined to get their hands on Miss Christy.

  In August 1830, George Robins and William Jones, two well-known body snatchers, were charged at Lambeth Street with attempting to steal the body of a Mrs. Brown from the rear of a chapel in Cannon Street Road, off Ratcliffe Highway, in the East End. A Metropolitan Police officer had spotted them around midnight and saw that Mrs. Brown’s grave was half open, with tools lying around it. Robins and Jones were sentenced to three months in jail.

  In March 1831, James Bailey, John Chapman, and Daniel Baker were charged at Union Hall with stealing two dead bodies, which had been found when police officers stopped the men’s cart in Brixton Road. The magistrate granted them bail.

  M. J. Durey’s “Bodysnatchers and Benthamites” alerted me to these references in the Times editions of 25 January, 9 April, and 24 August 1830 and 21 March 1831, respectively.

  13. Report, pp. 93–101.

  14. Partridge’s £50 allowance noted in King’s College archives file KA/C/M2; Bell quotation from Sir Charles Bell: His Life and Times by Sir Gordon Gordon-Taylor (1958), p. 30.

  15. According to Ruth Richardson, in her 1988 book Death, Dissection and the Destitute (reissued in 2001), “CD” was likely to have been Joshua Naples (p. 115). Naples is also strongly believed to be the author of the other major contemporary source of knowledge about resurrection in London; his Diary of a Resurrectionist, a diary-cum-logbook, dated 1811, is housed in the library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. CD told the committee that although he was virtually the sole supplier of corpses to the London schools between 1809 and 1811, he gave up the trade in 1820 because it had become too dangerous, with guards at graveyards increasingly likely to be armed and ready to fire (Report, p. 118).

  16. This was how anatomist Joshua Brookes (1761–1833) described them to the Select Committee (Report, p. 82).

  17. “Old Stories Re-Told” in All The Year Round, 16 March 1867.

  18. Weekly Dispatch, 27 November 1831.

  19. The Bishops lived near the Red Lion inn, which was at 90 North Hill (demolished in 1900), and the Wrestlers inn, which dates back to 1547 and today still holds the medieval Swearing on the Horns of Highgate drinking ritual. John Bishop the younger’s pub of choice, the Green Dragon (which dated back to at least 1730), was at 10 North Road, the southern end of North Hill; it was demolished in 1898 and Highgate School is now on the site.

  20. Their marriage license is in the St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, marriage registers at Guildhall Library and it reveals that Sarah was illiterate, as she signed with an X. St. Leonard’s, by architect George Dance the Elder (1695–1768), was completed in 1740 and still stands, at the busy junction of Shoreditch High Street, Old Street, Kingsland Road, and Hackney Road.

  21. Morning Advertiser, 25 November 1831.

  22. London Metropolitan Archives, Clerkenwell New Prison Committals Lists, MJ/CC/V/003.

  23. Revelations of Prison Life, pp. 28–30. Coldbath Fields, rebuilt in 1794, stood on the site of today’s Royal Mail depot at Mount Pleasant.

  24. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, First Session, 1827, p. 31.

  25. Times, 2 April 1831; Morning Herald, 2 April 1831.

  26. The Globe and Traveller of 5 December 1831 described the ground beneath the Gardens as “former waste—slag and rubbish,” which would indicate that it had once been a brickyard.

  27. The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Middlesex. Vol. II: Early Stepney with Bethnal Green (1998), p. 114.

  28. Figures given in the pamphlet Evidence of the Reverend William Stone (1833).

  29. “Four Views of London,” an anonymous essay in the June 1833 issue of the New Monthly Magazine.

  30. Morning Advertiser, 7 November and 12 November 1831.

  31. The Heads’ baptisms and burials took place at St. Leonard’s Church, Bridgnorth; the registers are held in the Shropshire Records and Research Centre in Shrewsbury, at P40/68 to P40/71 (1803–08). In a number of accounts, including those published by the Crown and by the Times, his names are used interchangeably, and James Williams and James Head are also thrown into the mix.

  32. As the anonymous writer of the penal-reform book Old Bailey Experience (James Harmer?) put it: “No man goes into Newgate twice with the same name, trade, or place of nativity” (p. 112).

  33. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Fourth Session, 1827, p. 323. Pontifex’s had been in business since 1780 and by 1831 stretched almost halfway down Shoe Lane on the east side; its main building survived until 1894 (The Parish of St Andrew Holborn by Caroline M. Barron [1979], pp. 107–08).

  34. Public Record Office, The Newgate List, 1826–28, PCOM 2/199.

  35. The riots are referred to in Michael Ignatieff’s A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (1978), p. 172.

  36. Weekly Dispatch, 11 December 1831. If found guilty, Williams would have faced a fine of a hundred pounds.

  37. St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, marriage register at Guildhall Library; Rhoda was illiterate and signed with an X. Thomas Head, “bachelor of this parish,” could read and write. The records of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, also show that one Mary Ann Bishop died aged five months in the workhouse on 2 March 1828; it is possible she was a daughter of John and Sarah.

  38. Dorset Street was a short road running east-west, just north of Rockingham Street. Today, the Rockingham Estate, postwar London County Council flats, covers the site, approximately where Rennie House stands.

  39. Clare Market opened in 1657. Until 1900, it stood where the northeastern section of Aldwych is today. Both New Inn and Clare Market disappeared during the construction of Aldwych and Kingsway, though a small section of street bearing the name Clare Market remains.

  40. Figures given by journalist Charles Knight in his London, vol. 1 (1841),
p. 164, a collection of essays on the capital previously published as newspaper columns.

  Chapter Three: The Thickest Part

  1. Oliver Twist, ch. 54.

  2. Public Record Office, Bow Street Magistrates Outgoing Correspondence, MEPO 1/49 and 1/50.

  3. Public Record Office, Home Office Letters, HO 59/2.

  4. King also called it “Thursday the 4th”—Thursday was in fact the third; the Morning Advertiser quotes her as giving the time as “between ten and eleven o’clock” in the morning.

  5. Report of the hearing in the Times, 22 November 1831.

  6. Public Record Office, Petitions and Pardons 1830–31, HO 64/2.

  7. Public Record Office, Home Office Domestic Letter Book, vol. 67, letter dated 15 November 1831, HO 43/41.

  8. Middle Row stood at the bottom of Gray’s Inn Road in front of Staple Inn and comprised a small cluster of Tudor buildings forming an island in the middle of High Holborn. It was pulled down in 1866 to widen the road.

  9. Times, 19 November 1831.

  10. Globe and Traveller, 12 November 1831.

  11. The outer walls and basement cells of the Clerkenwell New Prison (also called the Clerkenwell House of Detention) still stand, at Clerkenwell Close.

  12. Exchange reported in the Sun, 14 November 1831.

  13. “A Detective Police Party,” Household Words, 27 July 1850; reprinted in Dickens’ Journalism: The Amusements of the People, ed. Michael Slater (1996), vol. II of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism. In Oliver Twist, Dickens had shown his contempt for the Runners’ acumen by naming the two Runners called on to investigate a burglary Blathers and Duff.

  14. In a stimulating essay, historian Ruth Paley disputes the stereotype of the Charley, claiming that he was no older, more decrepit, or badly paid than most New Police officers in the early years of the Metropolitan Police (“An Imperfect, Inadequate and Wretched System? Policing London Before Peel,” Criminal Justice History 10 [1989]: 95–130). Certainly, a look through papers in the Public Record Office (at MEPO 1/44) shows a high turnover of recruits in the early years of the Met, with dismissals given largely on grounds of lack of physical fitness, absenteeism, and drunkenness. The first Metropolitan Police officer to be sworn in, PC William Atkinson, was sacked within an hour for drunkenness, as was the second, PC William Alcock. Some 1,790 of the first 2,800 men enlisted were sacked for being drunk on duty.