The Italian Boy (47 page)

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).