The Italian Boy (19 page)

*   *   *

Who had the right
to be in the streets? Who was entitled to space in the city? The much-discussed changes to the poor laws brought anticipation that all paupers—and thus, beggars—would soon be contained behind the high walls of grim new workhouses, with those unable to give a good account of themselves liable to imprisonment. A further crackdown was heralded in 1839 with an act of Parliament that gave the Metropolitan Police even greater powers to suppress noise and nuisance created by street sellers and the more enterprising beggars.
¹⁶

The Poor Laws that existed in 1831 had been devised in 1601, and one of their most important innovations had been the giving by the parish of “relief” (cash, food, clothing, and so on) to needy parishioners who applied for it and who were considered poor enough to warrant such state charity. In 1662, another law, the Act of Settlement, had been framed to coerce the poor into staying put—into not traveling the land in search of work or better pay and thereby causing local labor shortages or forcing the hand of local employers. Settlement meant that individuals were tied to their parish—usually their place of birth, though women were entitled to settlement in their husband’s parish upon marriage.
¹⁷
(The “beating of the bounds” is a medieval tradition that remains as spectacle in certain parts of England. On Ascension Day, a parish boy—usually an apprentice—was whipped with a willow wand at the parish boundaries, to remind him, illiterate as he probably was, of where he belonged and where he did not belong.) Parish authorities were responsible for providing help to the local poor; but this assistance was to be given only to those with a settlement in the parish. Admission to the workhouse was one way of feeding and housing those without work, the sick, and the old; another was the system of “outdoor relief,” which meant that the poor could, in theory at least, receive cash payments, food, and fuel, along with advances to buy work tools, clothing, and shoes, while remaining in their own homes—or out on the street.
¹⁸
The economic depressions of 1815 and 1825 pushed up the poor-rate levy paid by householders; where the nation’s poor rates had amounted to around £2 million at the turn of the century, in 1832 the figure stood at £8.6 million. One Briton in ten was wholly or partially dependent on poor relief. In 1821, Parliament had debated removing the right to any kind of relief to the able-bodied; but, with memories of Paris 1789 still fresh, it balked at such an inflammatory move.

The system of settlement was yet another antiquated, inadequate mechanism that was failing in the face of the needs of post–Industrial Revolution Britain. Casual, often factory-based, employment required a large influx of potential workers into town, though the jobs were often precarious or seasonal. Moreover, settlement disputes were a notoriously complex maze for even a lawyer to negotiate and took up an inordinate amount of time in the lower courts; the cost of such legal wrangles to the parishes of Great Britain was running at over £250,000 a year by the end of the Napoleonic Wars.
¹⁹
John Wade, writing in 1829, was amazed at the confusion and the potential for abuse of poor relief that the settlement system created. A surprising number of individuals, he claimed, were unable to name the parish to which they “belonged,” particularly the London-born poor, who were “so little acquainted with themselves”—a striking phrase that prefigures much later writing about the effects of urban living on the soul. “The number of persons,” wrote Wade, “who, with their families, find their way to the metropolis from the remote parts of Great Britain and Ireland, in hopes of finding employment, is inconceivable.… Having incurred the expense and fatigue of the journey, and entertaining hopes, probably, of a change in circumstances, they are loth to apply to the parishes where accident has fixed them and thereby subject themselves to forcible removal. In this dilemma, they often linger till all they possess in the world is sold or pledged, and then falling into utter destitution, the females do not infrequently resort to prostitution, the feeble-spirited among the males to begging, those of more profligate principles to petty thefts or more atrocious offences, contributing to swell the general mass of delinquency.” Wade estimated that around thirteen thousand people were removed from London and “passed back” (that is, forcibly returned by wagon to their parish of settlement, and to rural destitution) each year. Yet he conceded that there was no practical way of keeping someone where he or she did not want to live. Those who did stay in London were not properly dealt with by the parochial authorities, he wrote, but were passed from parish to parish, “driven to and fro like a weaver’s shuttle.”
²⁰

A young woman named Elizabeth Warner jumped into the New River near City Road on the morning of Wednesday, 7 October 1829. Two men passing by dived in and rescued her, and when, later, she was able to speak, she explained that she had come to London from Chigwell in Essex to find a job and had not eaten for three days or slept in a bed for a fortnight. She said that she had been denied parish relief because she did not belong to any London parish, that the Dicity would not relieve her because she had not resorted to begging; that the Blackfriars Road Magdalen Hospital for repentant prostitutes would not take her in because she had never sold her body. Warner was brought to the hospital ward of the Islington workhouse to recover, with the aim of her being “removed” to Chigwell at Islington’s expense.
²¹

Diving into a river to save a stranger was a brave act and, like the harrying of constables arresting beggars, flew in the face of the increasingly gloomy pronouncements about city life and the urban dweller’s excessive subjectivity and self-absorption. To John Wade, there was something sinister in the idea that “in the midst of a million people the Londoner can create for himself a social solitude.” For Thomas De Quincey, “No loneliness can be like that which weighs upon the heart in the centre of faces never-ending,… eyes innumerable,… and hurrying figures of men and women weaving to and fro”; and as James Grant, the editor of the
Morning Advertiser,
saw it, “Everyone runs, as though their house were on fire, even when they have no purpose. Nobody wants to know each other’s business.”
²²
But the poor did not appear either to dash about or to drift along withdrawn and uncommunicative—their intervention to help one another was noted with incredulity by some observers. One fact that disgusted many was that it was often those in poverty themselves who gave to beggars. J. T. Smith described a number of poor people pursuing a staggering drunk along High Holborn in order to hand coins to him because he had a piece of paper that read “Out of Employment” stuck to his hat; Smith found this deplorable and believed the message on the hat to be untrue.
²³

Such generosity may be evidence that the disparate groups that made up lower-class London felt something that could perhaps be described as emergent solidarity. “Hit him hard, he has no friends” was a saying among the London poor in the 1820s, a sardonic comment on the perceived lack of social justice for the powerless and impoverished.
²⁴
While London was one of the most heavily unionized areas of the country, with most trades having at least some sort of representative body, most Londoners were never members of unions—whether trades bodies or organizations pressing for political reform. But class consciousness was on the rise even outside politicized groups. Friendly societies and cooperatives were developing in the capital as early as 1820, and, in more settled areas, fragments of community appeared to be forming. If society had been torn apart by economic change, it was also in the process of putting itself back together again. Even Viscount Melbourne declared himself “well aware of the obstinate fidelity with which the lower classes cling to one another.”
²⁵

And the events of November 1831 were encouraging diverse types of Londoner to look at one another anew, to take note of the fates of those around them. Where once missing children had been consigned to privately printed handbills and the columns of the
Police Gazette,
not even making its front page but placed amid notices of absconding prisoners, deserting soldiers, absent fathers, and strayed livestock, the letters pages of national newspapers now throbbed with the concern of their gentleman readers. Thus in the
Times
of 29 November:

Sir, I have forwarded to you two cases of the loss of children, which I trust you will give publicity to, as the parents are too poor to pay for printing; and as it may be the means of discovery, at least in the recent case. In the month of March last, Mrs Hughes, a widow, of No 5, Paradise Place, Frog Lane, Islington, went out one morning to wash, leaving, as was her custom, her little boy at home; and on her return in the evening he was missing, and she has never heard of him since. He was seven years old; had on a blue jacket, black trousers, blue waistcoat, old brown pinafore, cloth cap and hob-nailed boots.

The other case was a boy about nine years of age, the son of a poor woman at Poplar. On the 15th of October last, he was at play with his little brother in the street, and told him that a man had promised him such lots of sugar—a great many basins full—and that he would bring him some when he came back. He then left his brother and has never returned. He had on a corduroy dress that had been washed, a good linen shirt, and half-boots.

I should be glad to render any assistance in discovering what has become of these poor children, and will satisfy any inquiries as far as lies in my power.

I am, yours, obediently, W.H.

And from the
Weekly Dispatch:
“Among the supposed victims to the ‘interests of science’ who have disappeared lately is a youth named Smith, about seventeen years of age, the son of respectable but unfortunate people in Grove Place, Camden Town. He was about 5ft 3 in, of florid complexion, with full, dark eyes, and rather stout. He left his father’s house on business last Tuesday evening, dressed in a blue coat and dark trousers, and has not been seen or heard of since.”
²⁶

After the arrest of Bishop, Williams, May, and Shields, the
Morning Advertiser
gave regular bulletins of missing children: Caroline Brand, eight, of Wolverley Street, Hackney Road, sent out by her parents to sell bundles of firewood one evening and not seen again, just as her thirteen-year-old brother had disappeared, five months before; and Henry Borroff, a five-year-old, of Barton Court, Hoxton Old Town—gone.

SEVEN

Neighbors

William Woodcock was awoken in his bed at 2 Nova Scotia Gardens at around one or two in the morning of Friday, 4 November, by a loud noise from next door. As was his habit, he had gone to bed at half past nine in the evening. He slept downstairs at the front of the house in a room that was next to the Bishops’ parlor. The sounds he heard were a “scuffling, or struggling,” as he described it, like the sound of men’s feet. The noises stopped suddenly, and he heard two sets of footsteps running from Bishop’s house and the slamming of the gate. Then Woodcock heard the slow, heavy tread of one person in the parlor. “Everything was quite still at the time and I could have heard a mouse stir. Had I known that any thing wrong was going on, I would have put my ear closer to the wall and might have heard every thing that passed.” After around a minute, the other two pairs of footsteps returned, and there was the sound of voices, though words were impossible to make out. Then all was quiet, and Woodcock fell back to sleep.

This was Woodcock’s evidence to George Rowland Minshull on Friday, 25 November, the final day of the magistrates’ hearings. Outside, in Bow Street, several hundred people had gathered and remained put all day, in spite of the heavy rain that fell for hours. Fifty persons “of rank” had written to Minshull to request a seat alongside the magistrate.

Minshull was keen to establish how many men Woodcock had heard during the disturbance.

“I can speak to the voices of two of the men, but I cannot speak as to the third,” said Woodcock. Minshull pressed him on whether he could recognize the voices. Would he be able to confirm that they belonged to Bishop, Williams, and May?

Woodcock replied that he had never heard the voice of Bishop—his neighbor of three weeks—or of May, though he believed that one of the voices had been Williams’s.

Williams called out from the dock that what Woodcock had heard was a row between him and John Bishop. Bishop, said Williams, had smashed some of Williams’s belongings and was about to start on Rhoda’s. Williams claimed that he had grabbed his wife’s looking glass, bonnet, and shawl and left the house at about two in the morning to fetch an officer of the New Police. The constable, however, had refused to come beyond the garden gate and had walked away.

“I distinctly contradict that,” said Woodcock; that particular row, he said, had happened on the Sunday before.

No, Williams retorted; the argument had happened on the Thursday … or perhaps the Friday.… “The women can say which night it was.”

At this point, Bishop, who was sitting alongside him, whispered something urgently in Williams’s ear, and Williams fell silent.

The magistrates were attempting to place May in the Bishop family home. Woodcock’s testimony that there had been three sets of feet and that there may have been three voices was an effort to make the cottage-sharing duo of Bishop and Williams a well-established trio, with May.

“To the best of your belief, were there three men?” Minshull asked Woodcock.