The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  12. Sir Astley Cooper himself was the proud owner of a chunk of intestine, featuring a fungal growth, that he claimed was a section of Napoleon’s gut. Its authenticity was uncertain at the time and will always remain so since it was destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was hit during an air raid in May 1941, in which Chunee’s skeleton also perished.

  13. Lancet, 24 November 1832.

  14. Reported in The Memoirs of John Abernethy by George MacIlwain (1853), p. 305.

  15. Lancet, 23 July 1833.

  16. Ibid., 1 October 1831.

  17. Sir Benjamin Brodie—a member of the Royal College council and, later, RCS president—was the son of a rural clergyman and became a baronet on the strength of his being made surgeon to William IV; Sir William Blizard, president of the Royal College in 1831, was the son of an auctioneer and had no formal education until his late adolescence; Sir Charles Bell had been excluded from the Edinburgh medical elite and subsequently suffered seven years of being overlooked in London before gaining respect for his work on nerve function; George Guthrie had been a child prodigy, becoming an RCS member at the age of fifteen before going off to the wars as a surgeon, his skills coming to the notice of the duke of Wellington (Guthrie turned down a knighthood).

  18. The Lancet gives a slightly different version of the story, claiming that the Anatomical Society pushed the price of bodies up so as to destroy Grainger and that, when the resurrectionists heard this, they decided to supply Grainger for free in order to make Webb Street flourish and so force the prices paid by hospitals even higher (Lancet, 24 November 1831).

  19. Report of the Select Committee on Medical Education, vol. 13, part 2, Q6602, p. 192. The 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy put the number of medical students in London at one thousand in 1823 and eight hundred in 1828 (Report of the 1828 Select Committee on Anatomy, p. 4).

  20. Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (1988), p. 163.

  21. Ruth Richardson discusses attacks on medical schools in Paisley, Sheffield, Inveresk (near Edinburgh), and—most dramatically—in Aberdeen, where the school of anatomy was burned to the ground upon the discovery of discarded dissected human remains.

  22. This anecdote is told in Westminster Hospital, 1716–1966 by J. G. Humble and Peter Hansell (1966) and in Things for the Surgeon by Hubert Cole (1964).

  23. Morning Chronicle, 2 October 1829; I have been unable to find any further reports of this case. In October 1831, Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas told George Rowland Minshull that “young medical students had repeatedly annoyed the neighbourhood”; Minshull had just remanded a student for assaulting Thomas in Brydges Street, Covent Garden (Globe and Traveller, 20 October 1831).

  24. Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy, p. 81.

  25. Isobel Rae’s biography Knox: The Anatomist is a moving account of Knox’s life, while Owen Dudley Edwards, in Burke & Hare (1980), presents an equally compelling, though more hostile, portrait of him.

  26. “Mary’s Ghost,” Hood’s Whims and Oddities (1826), a volume of verse on the topics of the day.

  27. Edward Cook was named as “a known resurrectionist” by “a publican who 12 years ago kept a house in West Smithfield,” according to the Sun, 14 November, 1831; this house may well have been the Fortune of War. Eliza Ross ostensibly made her money from selling old clothes, reputedly stripped from bodies snatched by Cook; the dealers she sold to, at Rag Fair, near the Tower of London, were able to name a number of articles that tallied with Walsh’s belongings that had been sold to them by Ross at the end of August. Ross’s neighbors in Goodman’s Yard also alleged that she was a notorious cat skinner, stealing and killing local cats and selling the furs at Rag Fair (reports in Sun, Globe and Traveller, and Times, November and December 1831, January 1832).

  28. John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Eric Robinson (1983), p. 132. It is ironic that when Clare died, insane, in 1864, his friends in the Northamptonshire village of Helpston held a wake for his body, as it had been rumored that a London anatomist intended to get hold of Clare’s brain in order to dissect it and discover how it was that a madman had been able to write poetry (A Right to Song: The Life of John Clare by Edward Storey [1982], p. 297).

  29. Ruth Richardson tells this story in Death, Dissection and the Destitute, p. 221.

  30. Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy, p. 47.

  31. Knox’s letter to the Caledonian Mercury, written two months after William Burke’s execution, and Knox’s only public pronouncement on the affair; quoted in Isobel Rae’s Knox: The Anatomist, pp. 98–99.

  32. Report and Evidence of the Select Committee on Anatomy, p. 18.

  33. The Life of Astley Cooper by Bransby Cooper (1843), p. 334. An example of one of these experiments is on show in the Gordon Museum at Guy’s Hospital. According to R. C. Brock in The Life and Work of Sir Astley Cooper (1952), Cooper kept human corpses in his attic from time to time and had obtained permission to do so from the lord mayor of London, who assured Cooper that he would not be troubled by constables and magistrates.

  34. Lancet, 16 October 1831.

  35. A Letter to the Right Honourable the Secretary of State for the Home Department Containing Remarks on the Report of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Anatomy (1829).

  36. Morning Advertiser, 11 October 1831.

  37. British Police and the Democratic Ideal by Charles Reith, p. 94.

  38. George Douchez, who had also been present at the 6 November postmortem in St. Paul’s watch house, lived—and may have had a theater of sorts—in Golden Square itself; Thomas Copland, surgeon, lived at 4 Golden Square, on its east side; while John Joberns, surgeon, lived at 9 Upper John Street, which led into the square. Joseph Carpue’s school in Dean Street, the Brookesian, and the Great Windmill Street School could have been described as near to Golden Square. But the most likely candidate is George Darby Dermott’s practice; Dermott was working from a theater actually on the square before taking his anatomy academy to Gerrard Street in 1833. The great John Hunter (brother of William of the Great Windmill Street School) lived and lectured at 31 Golden Square (where he had built a dissecting room) between 1763 and 1769, and it is possible that Dermott, or even Douchez, was using Hunter’s former premises.

  39. John Hilton (1805–78) was demonstrator of anatomy at Guy’s from 1828 on. He had a brilliant reputation as an anatomist and later in life became surgeon to Queen Victoria and president of the RCS; he had the honor of performing the postmortem on Sir Astley Cooper when the baronet died in 1841. Hilton was the first surgeon to give a clear account of cerebrospinal fluid; and his book Rest and Pain, on the importance of recuperation, was the first to explore in an empirical way the benefits of rest. He himself shunned the notion of empiricism and the “scientific” community and found Charles Darwin’s ideas ludicrous. Hilton believed that life, death, and the spirit could never be understood in chemical or physical terms: “All is darkness to the human understanding,” he said (A Biographical History of Guy’s Hospital by Samuel Wilks and G. T. Bettany [1892]). Hilton gave waxwork-maker Joseph Towne detailed anatomical information when Towne was producing his celebrated wax anatomical figures, which are still in the Gordon Museum at Guy’s. Towne habitually worked alone in a locked room with corpses and wax, and his methods died with him.

  40. Morning Advertiser, 5 December 1831.

  41. The quotation is from The Centenary History of King’s College London by F. J. C. Hearnshaw, p. 293.

  42. King’s and Some King’s Men by H. Willoughby Lyle, p. 301.

  Chapter Eleven: At the Bailey

  1. Serjeant Ballantine, Some Experiences of a Barrister’s Life (1882). No one seems to have recorded how lawyers smelled.

  As a child, Ballantine was taken by his father to see the trial of Bishop, Williams, and May.

  2. Reports from the Times, Morning Advertiser, and Globe and Traveller are from editions dated 3 December 1831, the Weekly Dispatch from 4 December 1
831. The basic narrative of the trial is taken from Old Bailey Sessions Papers for 1831. It is supposed to be a comprehensive report of proceedings but is nothing of the sort: much is left out, and the newspaper accounts are an invaluable backup. The staccato, elliptical nature of the Sessions Papers are evidence that much was jettisoned in publishing a formal report of trials of the day.

  3. Bodkin’s copy of Arabiniana is in the British Library.

  4. The disparaging contemporary was Serjeant Ballantine.

  5. See n. 12, below.

  6. The indictment can be found in the London Metropolitan Archives, Old Bailey Sessions Roll, OB/SR609/10.

  7. In Old Bailey Experience: Criminal Jurisprudence and the Actual Working of Our Penal Code of Laws (1833), some judges were said to boast of their capacity to get through sixty to seventy criminal cases a day (p. 60).

  8. “Mr Adolphus and His Contemporaries,” Law Magazine 4 (1846): 60. Drunkenness among lawyers and judges is also noted in Ballantine’s Experiences, p. 54.

  9. Roderick Floud’s book Height, Health and History, 1750–1980 (1990) contains tables of the heights of adolescent recruits to the Marine Society—a charity that “rescued” street boys and trained them to be sailors—and to the Sandhurst Military Academy; Floud’s data for the 1820s and 1830s suggests the class basis for height differentials.

  10. In the late 1820s, a five-year-old who could not see over the bar of the prisoners’ dock was put on trial at the Old Bailey; he had taken a watch from the counter of a baker’s shop in Ealing, thinking that his mother would like to see how pretty it was (“The Schoolmaster’s Experience of Newgate,” Fraser’s Magazine, June 1832).

  11. William Street is today’s Rockingham Street; the Alfred’s Head is no more.

  12. There is a striking similarity between this passage and the paragraphs in Chapter 52 of Oliver Twist that describe Fagin’s trial at the Old Bailey.

  The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the galleries, all looks were fixed upon one man—the Jew. Before him and behind: above, below, on the right and on the left: he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.

  He stood there in all this glare of living light, with one hand resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear, and his head thrust forward to enable him to catch with greater distinctness every word that fell from the presiding judge, who was delivering his charge to the jury. At times, he turned his eyes sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight in his favour; and when the points against him were stated with terrible distinctness, looked towards his counsel, in mute appeal that he would, even then, urge something in his behalf. Beyond these manifestations of anxiety, he stirred not hand or foot. He had scarcely moved since the trial began; and now that the judge ceased to speak, he still remained in the same strained attitude of close attention, with his gaze bent on him, as though he listened still.

  A slight bustle in the court recalled him to himself. Looking round, he saw that the jurymen had turned together, to consider of their verdict. As his eyes wandered to the gallery, he could see the people rising above each other to see his face: some hastily applying their glasses to their eyes: and others whispering to their neighbours with looks expressive of abhorrence. A few there were, who seemed unmindful of him, and looked only to the jury, in impatient wonder how they could delay. But in no one face—not even among the women, of whom there were many there—could he read the faintest sympathy with himself, or any feeling but one of all absorbing interest that he should be condemned.

  As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the death-like stillness came again, and looking back, he saw that the jurymen had turned towards the judge. Hush!

  They only sought permission to retire.

  He looked, wistfully, into their faces, one by one, when they passed out, as though to see which way the greater number leant; but that was fruitless. The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair. The man pointed it out, or he would not have seen it.…

  At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all towards the door. The jury returned, and passed him close. He could glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone. Perfect stillness ensued—not a rustle—not a breath—Guilty.

  The building rang with a tremendous shout, and another, and another, and then it echoed deep loud groans, that gathered strength as they swelled out, like angry thunder. It was a peal of joy from the populace outside, greeting the news that he would die on Monday.

  The noise subsided, and he was asked if he had anything to say why sentence of death should not be passed upon him. He had resumed his listening attitude, and looked intently at his questioner while the demand was made; but it was twice repeated before he seemed to hear it, and then he only muttered that he was an old man—an old man—an old man—and so, dropping into a whisper, was silent again.

  The judge assumed the black cap, and the prisoner still stood with the same air and gesture. A woman in the gallery uttered some exclamation, called forth by this dread solemnity; he looked hastily up as if angry at the interruption, and bent forward yet more attentively. The address was solemn and impressive; the sentence fearful to hear. But he stood, like a marble figure, without the motion of a nerve. His haggard face was still thrust forward, his under-jaw hanging down, and his eyes staring out before him, when the jailer put his hand upon his arm, and beckoned him away. He gazed stupidly about him for an instant, and obeyed.

  In the Bishop, Williams, and May passage, an attempt is made to “read” the accused by examining their movements and appearance, though the writer has the humility to show that this exercise is doomed to failure: we cannot know what is passing through their minds. And the portrait of the three accused is not hostile, even though they were standing trial for appallingly brutal crimes. This humility, this sensitivity and empathy, is more novelistic than journalistic. With Fagin in the dock in Oliver Twist, Dickens sees a similar scene from the inside: Fagin cannot confront his own thoughts, and as soon as the full horror of his situation rises in his mind, his consciousness takes flight by alighting on the various phenomena in front of him in the courtroom. In both quoted passages, what is about to happen is so dreadful that surface details rush in to fill the vacuum of the unthinkable.

  Not long into researching this book, I learned that two others had also suspected that the passage from the Bishop, Williams, and May trial that begins “The Most Deathlike Silence” was the unacknowledged early work of Charles Dickens, a nineteen-year-old shorthand reporter at the time of the trial. A cutting, “Dickens and the Times: Traces of His Hand,” is one of many smaller items collated by Dickensiana collector John F. Dexter and presented to the British Museum (and now held in the British Library). Dexter’s cutting from the Times dates from 1933 and discusses the similarity between Dickens’s fiction and a number of police-court cases—at Great Marlborough Street and Hatton Garden—that had appeared in the Times one century earlier. In a handwritten note, Dexter prefaces a copy of the 1831 broadsheet Burking the Italian Boy! Fairburn’s Edition of the Trial of Bishop and Williams, Tried at the Old Bailey. Taken in Shorthand (which reprints “The Most Deathlike Silence” paragraphs in full) with the words: “FW Pailthorpe gave me this pamphlet stating that it was ‘reported’ by Charles Dickens and that he had this information from an authoritative source. The description of the prisoners on pages 21–22 bears evidence of Charles Dickens’s hand.” Frederick William Pailthorpe (1838–1914) was an illustrator of Dickens’s fiction in editions that appeared after Dickens’s death in 1870; I have been unable to establish that Pailthorpe ever met Dickens. Pailthorpe’s “authoritative source” is unknown, but artist, satirist, and illustrator George Cruikshank (1792–1878), who provided illustratio
ns for Sketches by Boz, Oliver Twist, and other Dickens works and who often sketched prisoners in the dock at the Old Bailey, is a strong candidate.

  Dickens’s biographer Peter Ackroyd briefly mentions this find of John F. Dexter’s in his 1990 book Dickens (p. 134).

  There is only anecdotal evidence that Dickens’s reporting career before the spring of 1832 consisted of anything other than stints in the reporters’ gallery of the Houses of Parliament and at the ecclesiastical and naval court of Doctors Commons, which stood just to the south of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in Knightrider Street. Furthermore, while Dickens’s maternal uncle John Henry Barrow had links with the Times (and is said to have helped Dickens learn shorthand), there is no evidence that his nephew was connected to that paper at any point in the earliest stage of his career; and none whatever that Dickens had anything to do with Fairburn, purveyor of inexpensive woodcut-illustrated broadsheets.

  It is reasonable to assume that if such a lucky—and lucrative—break as reporting one of the crimes of the century had come Dickens’s way in 1831, he would have referred to it at the time (in letters or in conversation) or in later years. In fact, direct references to the Bishop and Williams case are scarce in Dickens’s journalism and nonexistent in his correspondence that has survived. Though body snatchers appear in Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities, these novels are set in the 1780s; resurrection and burking were, it seems, of comparatively little interest to Dickens in his tales of urban lowlife of the 1820s and 1830s.

  In November 1835, Dickens was given an entrance pass to Newgate so that he could tour the jail, with a view to writing a profile of it. In his sketch “A Visit to Newgate,” which Dickens wrote soon after, he notes the death masks of “the two notorious murderers” Bishop and Williams (which were almost the only objects furnishing a small anteroom), “the former, in particular, exhibiting a style of head and set of features which might have afforded sufficient moral grounds for his instant execution at any time, even had there been no other evidence against him.” Is it just the facetious tone here that gives the impression that Dickens knew not a great deal about Bishop? Certainly, he makes no attempt to add any background information, as he would surely have been tempted to if he had once had the good fortune to sit just yards from the killers and observe them in minute detail.