The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  15. Morning Chronicle, 26 September 1828.

  16. Times, 31 March 1832.

  17. Papers at the Public Record Office (at MEPO 1/44) include what amounts to an apology from Commissioner Rowan to the editor of the Times for the number of reprimands and dismissals of Metropolitan Police officers, dated 11 November 1830; while on 16 December 1830 the chief clerk of Bow Street wrote to the editors of the Times, the Morning Chronicle, and the Morning Herald to deny reports that there were plans to enlarge the force.

  18. Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by Henry Goddard; written in 1856 but not published until 1956.

  19. The most recent literary sensation before Vidocq’s Mémoires—similarly reaching all classes of Londoner—had been Pierce Egan’s Life in London books, published (and much plagiarized) between 1821 and 1828. The appeal of Egan’s comic series lay in its evocation of high life and low life, with its heroes crossing social boundaries in a way that real Londoners could not.

  20. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 73.

  21. Ibid., p. 76.

  22. Ibid., p. 80. The Marquis of Anglesey is still there; the Brown Bear is no more.

  23. Report from the Select Committee on Allegations Relative to the Conduct of Certain Magistrates in the Holborn Division of Middlesex in Granting Licences for Victual Houses, 1833, p. 261.

  24. Public Record Office, Letter from Richard Mayne, 19 May 1830, MEPO 1/44 3.

  25. Among Minshull’s judgments to cause merriment and alarm in equal measure was his decision in December 1831 to jail four boys—itinerant peddlers of broadsheets—for selling prints of a picture of a child playing with a kitten that was dressed in a petticoat; Minshull took it into his head that this picture was somehow indecent, and, according to the Sun of 26 December 1831, his aim “was to stop the circulation of such an infamous publication.” The article goes on to sneer that if Minshull was right, the reporter would never let his grandmother visit the British Museum again, in case any of the antiquities should inflame her passions.

  26. The First Detectives by Belton Cobb (1957), p. 59.

  27. British Police and the Democratic Ideal by Charles Reith (1943), pp. 90–93.

  28. The Place Papers, British Museum Add Mss 27,789, vol. 1, ff184–86.

  29. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 81.

  Chapter Four: Houseless Wretches

  1. Lord Melbourne by L. G. Mitchell (1997), p. 152. William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848), became home secretary in November 1830 in the Whig government led by Earl Grey; his undersecretary was his brother, George.

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

  3. Morning Advertiser, 9 November 1831.

  4. Dickens worked at Warren’s blacking factory at 30 Hungerford Stairs, just off the Strand, near to where Charing Cross station stands today, and then in Chandos Street, when the factory moved premises. The work involved pasting labels onto pots of blacking—used to keep fire grates, stoves, boots, and metalwork freshly black. In Camden his landlady was Mrs. Roylance, “a reduced old lady,” as he later described her, whose house was in Little College Street. (The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, vol. 1 [1872], pp. 31–38.)

  5. John Wontner’s evidence in the Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Cause of the Increase in the Number of Commitments and Convictions in London and Middlesex, 1828, p. 54.

  6. Times, 21 March 1826.

  7. The Sixth Report of the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1824).

  8. The Morning Chronicle of 27 September 1829 reported 120 vagrants being repeatedly cleared from a brickyard in Ratcliff, east London, where they were accustomed to spending the night; they included children as young as eleven years old.

  9. Morning Post, 29 September 1828.

  10. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, appendix D, p. 317. An attempt to assess each child’s educational level is made in this table; Elizabeth Butler could make out a few words but was unable to write; her only schooling had been at a Sunday school in Whitechapel. Most of the children who passed through London’s judicial and penal systems in the 1820s seemed to have acquired at least a small degree of literacy.

  11. The Corn Laws, introduced in 1804, set high import tariffs to prevent foreign corn from coming into the country until British corn had attained a certain price, whereupon the tariff dropped. This protectionism kept bread prices high until the repeal of the laws in 1846. By contrast, “free trade” had ensured the collapse of the English silk industry.

  12. Brenton’s open letter to the bishop of London was published in 1832 in pamphlet form as part of a series of addresses to the great and good entitled On Population, Agriculture, Poor Laws and Juvenile Vagrancy. On retiring from the navy, Brenton (1774–1839) founded the Society for the Relief of Shipwrecked Mariners and the Children’s Friend Society and set up the Brenton Juvenile Asylum at East Ham. He was also on the board of management of the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy.

  13. London would not get a unitary authority until 1888—decades after Britain’s other cities—with the creation of the London County Council. Until then, London’s local government was administered by its parish vestries—of medieval origin—and boards for lighting, paving and “works” (construction), and so on.

  14. For example, of 3,035 committals for vagrancy between February 1827 and April 1828, only 73 convictions were properly documented by London magistrates, which meant that almost 3,000 people were being detained in prison with no written proof of their guilt or of the evidence that had been used to convict them (evidence given by Serjeant Pell, a Middlesex magistrate, to the 1828 Police Select Committee, Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 236).

  15. Morning Post, 24 November 1831.

  Similarly, police officers are on record as showing kindness to vagrants. In 1831 officers took a sick and homeless man to St. Giles workhouse in order to find him a meal and a bed for the night but were told by the doorkeeper that since it was after nine o’clock at night there could be no new admission, and that they could take the man “to hell.” Instead, the officers formally arrested the beggar to give him shelter in a tiny cell in Covent Garden’s Dyott Street station. In the morning they found him dead. Source: Lancet, 13 August 1831.

  16. 5 Geo IV c 83.

  17. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 81.

  18. A total of nineteen men were executed for taking part in Swing disturbances.

  19. Conway lived at 52 North Road, close to the Bishop family home (Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants, 1821, p. 39).

  20. The Twelfth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1830). One of the Dicity’s founders was William Henry Bodkin, who crops up later in our story as a prosecuting counsel at the Old Bailey. Bodkin had also been chairman of the Houseless Poor Association charity and had a place on the 1828 Police Select Committee.

  21. The Eleventh Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1829).

  22. Morning Chronicle, 22 September 1829. Laing would be satirized by Charles Dickens as the arrogant and vicious magistrate Fang in Oliver Twist (ch. 11), while the satirical newspaper Figaro in London would claim of Laing “his inhumanity is as proverbial as his ignorance” (24 December 1831).

  23. The Twelfth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1830).

  The year before, the following people had arrived at Red Lion Square:

  “MS,” 17, a female pilferer, keeps running from home;

  “EB,” 21, a Bristol girl, persistently begs in London;

  “AG,” 30, deserted by husband and has a child, no legal settlement given since she is Irish, though has spent 19 years in London;

  “CF,” 12, a girl sent out to beg by her mother;

  “JR,” 14, a Scot, his father’s vessel sailed and he was abandoned in London, taken in by a woman, sent to the Society and thence
to Scotland;

  “TL” and “WL,” two strong, lazy, idle fellows arrested for infesting the Kent Road and given three months in Guildford jail;

  “RG,” borrowed a wife and three children to beg at the office;

  “PC,” 16, “Swiss,” an impostor with a wealthy brother;

  “WM,” queued at the dock gates for fourteen days applying to get shifts;

  “MC,” 29, Irish with four children, found in a doorway in Chancery Lane with three women standing by looking worried, all were fakes, even the children—whatever money is procured by the deception is equally divided, and the night spent most jovially in the purlieus of St. Giles (The Eleventh Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity [1829]).

  24. The Twelfth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1830).

  25. Times, 2 April 1834.

  26. Young Charles Dickens amused himself by looking at the pineapples during his lunch hour (The Life of Charles Dickens by John Forster, vol. 1, p. 36).

  27. The Cries of London by J. T. Smith (1839).

  28. Eighth Report of the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1826).

  29. Globe and Traveller, 12 November 1831.

  30. Two books contain fascinating background on the trade in Italian children: The Little Slaves of the Harp by John E. Zucchi (1992) and Italian Immigrants in 19th-Century Britain: Realities and Images by Lucio Sponza (1988).

  31. Giuseppe Leonardi, fifteen, died of lung disease—thought to have been brought on by neglect—in St. Giles workhouse in 1845; his padrone, Rabbiotti, was charged with manslaughter but acquitted. In 1861, five-year-old Carminello Ada died in St. Pancras workhouse after having been found suspended by his arms and legs from a ceiling and covered in bite marks (The Little Slaves of the Harp).

  32. Times, 2 April 1834. I have been unable to find any such petition in the surviving Home Office records in the Public Record Office. Stuart (1803–54) was the grandson of Thomas Coutts, banking tycoon. His cousin was the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, who in 1837 would inherit the Coutts fortune.

  33. Charles MacFarlane, Popular Customs, Sports and Recollections of the South of Italy (1846), p. 135; Charles Knight, London, vol. 1 (1841), p. 423.

  Chapter Five: Systematic Slaughter

  1. The Registers of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, ed. the Reverend William H. Hunt, vol. 5: Burials, 1752–1853 (1909). The entry says, “supposed to be about 14.” Although the graveyard, in Cleveland Street, has been cleared, the workhouse building, dating from 1778, remains as the outpatients’ department of the Middlesex Hospital.

  2. Globe and Traveller, 14 November 1831.

  3. Method described in The Sack ’Em Up Men by Richard L. Hewer (1928), p. 152.

  4. The Life of Sir Astley Cooper by Bransby Cooper (1843), p. 395.

  5. Quotation from Weekly Dispatch, 20 November 1831; Observer, 20 November 1831.

  6. Times, 21 November 1831.

  7. Morning Advertiser, 12 November 1831.

  Chapter Six: Houseless Wretches Again

  1. Horsey, Johnson, Dancing Doll Man, and Blind Charles Wood feature in J. T. Smith’s Vagabondiana (1817). In vol. 1 of journalist Charles Knight’s London (1841), Samuel Horsey is also fondly remembered as “half a Hercules” (p. 424).

  2. Tim Buc Too was also known as Brutus Billy; he lived in White Horse Yard, off Stanhope Street, Drury Lane, dying in 1854 at the age of eighty-seven (Some Account of the Parish of Saint Clement Danes Past and Present by John Diprose [1868], p. 164). “TL” is mentioned in The Thirteenth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (1831). Work on Marc Isambard Brunel’s tunnel from Wapping to Rotherhithe started in 1825 but was not to be completed until 1840, by which time ten men had died during construction and the project was over budget. The Times dubbed it the Great Bore.

  3. London, vol. 1, p. 424.

  4. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 83.

  5. Suggestions for the Architectural Improvement of the Western Part of London by Sydney Smirke (1834).

  6. De Quincey, “The Nation of London” (1834), in The Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (1939), p. 173; Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), in Selected Tales, ed. Julian Symons (1980); and John Hogg, London as It Is (1837). Hogg diagnosed even the upper-class London male as haggard, glassy-eyed, and emaciated: “Everything is getting later and later, due to the pressure of commerce and business,” he said (p. 342).

  7. George Boulton Mainwaring, a JP at the Worship Street magistrates office, one of the offices that dealt with the East End of London (Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants, 1821, p. 61).

  8. Williams Burke and Hare and their wives spent a large portion of the proceeds of murder on ostentatious clothing; their new glamour was noted by neighbors, who did not suspect how they had come into the money.

  9. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 128.

  10. A Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis (1829), p. 135.

  11. There were others engaged in the trade of London typologizing: Francis Grose published his Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence in 1823; The Strangers Guide: or, Frauds of London Detected was published in 1808 by George Smeeton, who also wrote Doings in London in 1828.

  12. Ann Taylor story from the Morning Chronicle, 29 September 1829; Taylor was sentenced by magistrates to three months in the Bridewell prison for attempting to obtain charity under false pretenses. Jane Weston case reported in Hue and Cry, 27 January 1826. James Prior case in Hue and Cry, 7 February 1827.

  13. The Cries of London (1839).

  14. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 128.

  15. The alderman’s comment was reported in the Morning Chronicle, 6 October 1829; the attraction of the Temple Bar shenanigans is mentioned in British Police and the Democratic Ideal by Charles Reith (1943), p. 73.

  16. To what extent the police took advantage of these powers has been discussed by Steven Inwood in his essay “Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829–1850,” London Journal 15, no. 2 (1990): 129–46. Inwood points out that although the following activities were banned in 1839, accounts from the 1840s and later show that they nevertheless proliferated: causing public obstruction or danger with animals or vehicles; rolling tubs, hoops, and wheels unnecessarily; posting bills; writing on walls; using threatening or abusive words or behavior; using noisy instruments in the process of begging, selling, or entertaining in the street; throwing stones; lighting fires or fireworks; ringing or knocking at doors; putting out lamps; soliciting or loitering; selling indecent pictures; singing indecent songs; using profane language; flying kites; and using a dogcart.

  17. The 1662 Act of Settlement was modified over the course of the eighteenth century and places of settlement could be changed in a number of other ways: paying ten pounds or more in rent in a new parish automatically granted resettlement, as did the payment of local taxes for a specified period, the completion of a year’s service in a parish office, or the fulfillment of an indentured apprenticeship—all of which actions tended to favor those who were either reasonably wealthy or educated or in a fairly secure trade. However, some parishes were “closed,” forbidding any kind of settlement to newcomers in order to keep the poor rates down. James Stephen Taylor’s excellent book Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution (1989) gives many examples of settlement disputes within the City of London’s St. Martin Vintry ward.

  18. A Select Committee of 1828 claimed that parish poor relief was uncoordinated across the country and that while some people received help without having to perform any parochial tasks, others had to do a great deal of work. The level of financial support given was supposed to reflect the number of people the head of the family maintained. Some parishes refused to give any outdoor relief, insisting that the workhouse was the only opt
ion, even for the sick or elderly; the committee estimated that nine out of ten impoverished people were refusing to go into the workhouse—even if that was the only source of aid (Report of the Select Committee on That Part of the Poor Laws Relating to the Employment or Relief of Able-Bodied Persons from the Poor Rate, 1828, p. 169).

  19. Richard Burn’s five-volume Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer—a manual of legal rules and precedents for JPs, published in various editions beginning in 1818—dedicates one whole volume, volume 4, at 1,286 pages, to the “relief and ordering of the poor,” with advice on settlements and removal orders.

  20. J. Wade, A Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis (1829), pp. 137–40.

  Wade’s life’s work was to expose in print the idiocies and inequities of a nation ruled by a backward-looking aristocracy. A workingman made good (he had been a woolsorter), he was a Benthamite Radical, whose Extraordinary Black Book (1831) was colloquially known as “the Reformer’s Bible,” as it listed the abuses of the undemocratic, unaccountable bodies that controlled British public life.

  21. Morning Chronicle, 9 October 1829.

  22. Wade, Treatise, p. 6; The Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, pp. 173–74; James Grant, The Great Metropolis, vol. 1 (1837), p. 6.

  23. Smith, Vagabondiana. The Select Committee that investigated vagrancy in 1821 included evidence from Yorkshire that members of the working class never refused money to a blind beggar and would even borrow in order to be able to give alms; those in receipt of parish relief had also been spotted helping beggars (Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants, 1821).