The Italian Boy - Couverture rigide

ONE

Suspiciously Fresh

George Beaman, surgeon to the parish of St Paul’s, Covent Garden, turned back the scalp of the corpse lying before him. Beneath the skin he found evidence of internal bleeding, and, peeling away the flesh along the length of the neck, he saw similar minor haemorrhages at the top of the spinal column. He concluded that death had been caused by a sharp blow to the back of the neck.

The body was that of a boy of around fourteen years of age, 4 feet 6 inches in height, with fair hair and grey eyes that were bloodshot and bulging. Blood oozed from an inch-long wound on his left temple, and his toothless gums were dripping blood. At the time of his killing, a meal – which had included potatoes and a quantity of rum – was being digested. A large, powerful hand had grasped the boy on his left forearm – black bruises from the finger marks were plainly visible – and earth or clay had been smeared across the torso and thighs. The chest appeared to have caved in slightly, as though someone had knelt upon it. The heart contained scarcely any blood, which Beaman took to indicate a very sudden death, but all the other organs were found to have been unremarkable and perfectly healthy. The most perplexing thing about the corpse was its freshness: it had been alive three days earlier, Beaman felt sure; and it was also clear to the surgeon that this body had never been buried, had never even been laid out in preparation for burial – and yet it had been delivered to King’s College’s anatomy department as a Subject for medical students to dissect.

It was late evening, Sunday 6 November 1831, and Beaman was anatomising the corpse in the tiny watch-house in the graveyard of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, at the request of local magistrates. He and a number of fellow surgeons had been probing and exploring the body in the first-floor room since early afternoon. A sunny winter’s day had turned into a chilly evening by the time the medical men had made up their minds about the cause of death. As Beaman and four colleagues left, two young trainees, by now feeling faint with tiredness and nausea, were left in the cold, stuffy room to sew up the corpse. Working alongside Beaman had been Herbert Mayo and Richard Partridge, respectively professor and demonstrator of anatomy at King’s College, just a few streets away in the Strand. The day before, Partridge had sent for the police when one of the bodysnatching gangs that supplied disinterred corpses to medical schools had tipped this body out of a sack on to the stone floor of the dissecting-room at King’s. It had looked suspiciously fresh. Partridge tricked the bodysnatchers into waiting at King’s while police officers were summoned, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, John Bishop, James May, Thomas Williams and Michael Shields were arrested on suspicion of murder.

‘We are proceeding in the dark,’ complained a member of the coroner’s jury at the inquest on the King’s College body two days later. The hearing was under way at the Unicorn public house, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, which backed on to St Paul’s watch-house. It appeared to the jury that no one in authority was able to rebut or confirm the various rumours about the identity of the dead boy; speculation about who the child had been had even reached the national newspapers. But as soon as any goings-on at hospitals were mentioned, or any surgeon looked likely to be named, the coroner and the parish clerk of St Paul’s would go into a huddle to discuss between them whether the inquest should proceed or be adjourned. How – the jury asked – can we be expected to arrive at a verdict when we don’t even know who has died?

On Sunday the 6th, worried parents of missing sons had been admitted to the watch-house to view the body, having read a description of the boy circulated in police handbills and notices posted on walls, doors and windows throughout the parish. Among the visitors had been several Italians. Signor Francis Bernasconi of Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, ‘plasterer to His Majesty’, had wondered whether the deceased was a boy from Genoa who had made his living as an ‘image boy’ – hawking wax or plaster busts of the great and the good, past and present, about the streets of London. Bernasconi was a plaster figurine-maker, or figurinaio, and he employed a number of Italian child immigrants to advertise and sell his wares in this way. Another figurinaio said the dead boy had sometimes helped to paint the plaster figures, and that his ‘master’ had left England at the end of September. The minister at the Italian Chapel in Oxenden Street, off the Haymarket, claimed that the boy had been a member of his congregation, but was unable to name him. Two more Italians identified the dead boy as an Italian beggar who walked the streets carrying a tortoise, which he exhibited in the hope of receiving a few pennies; while Joseph and Mary Paragalli of Parker Street, Covent Garden, said the boy was an Italian who wandered the West End exhibiting white mice in a cage suspended around his neck. (Joseph was a street musician, playing barrel organ and pan-pipes.) The Paragallis had known the child for about a year, they said, but neither of them suggested a name for him. Mary Paragalli claimed she had last seen him alive shortly after noon on Tuesday 1 November in Oxford Street, near Hanover Square.

Charles Starbuck, a stockbroker, had come forward to tell the Bow Street police officers that he believed the boy to be an Italian beggar who was often to be seen near the Bank of England exhibiting white mice in a cage; Starbuck had viewed the body and was in ‘no doubt’ about it being the same child. He had seen the boy looking tired and ill, sitting with his head sunk almost to his lap, on the evening of Thursday 3 November between half-past six and eight o’clock. Starbuck was walking with his brother near the Bank and said, ‘I think he is unwell,’ but his brother replied, ‘I think he’s a humbug. I’ve often seen him in that position.’ A crowd gathered round, concerned at the boy’s condition, and one youth told the boy he ought to move along as police officers were heading that way. The Starbucks walked on. On Wednesday the 9th, however, Charles Starbuck wrote to the coroner to say that he had subsequently seen this boy near the Bank, and retracted his identification.

The newspapers seized on the possible Italian connection remarkably swiftly, with The Times reporting the first day of the coroner’s hearing as ‘The Inquest on the Italian Boy’, when no such identity had been confirmed. In fact, The Times reporter seems to have been quite carried away with emotion by the death of ‘the poor little fellow who used to go about the streets hugging a live tortoise, and soliciting, with a smiling countenance, in broken English and Italian, a few coppers for the use of himself and his dumb friend.’ The report continued:

We saw the body last night, and were struck with its fine healthy appearance. . . . The countenance of the boy does not exhibit the least contortion, but, on the contrary, wears the repose of sleep, and the same open and good-humoured expression which marked the features in life is still discernible.

This was a fantastical statement, since only someone able to make a positive identification could possibly know how the child had looked when alive. The following day, the Thunderer thundered thus, in an extraordinary editorial:

If it shall be proved that he was murdered, for the purpose of deriving a horrible livelihood from the disposal of his body – if wretches have picked up from our streets an unprotected foreign child, and prepared him for the dissecting knife by assassination – if they have prowled about in order to obtain Subjects for a dissecting-room – then we may be assured that this is not a solitary crime of its kind.

In such a way, rumour was being reported as fact – a matter that was not lost on the coroner’s jury. Their exasperation compelled vestry clerk James Corder, who was overseeing proceedings, to state that he understood ‘from inquiries he had made’ that the dead boy was called Giacomo Montero, a beggar who had been brought to London a year earlier by an Italian named Pietro Massa, who lived in Liquorpond Street, in the area of Holborn known colloquially as Little Italy. But here, Joseph Paragalli spoke up to say that he had made his own inquiries at the Home Office’s ‘Alien Office’, near Whitehall, and that the description held there of Montero did not fit the dead boy in the least. Perhaps then, said Corder, the boy had been Giovanni Balavezzolo, another Italian vagrant boy who was said to be missing from his usual haunts. Corder told the jury they ought simply to return a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown. The jury remained unimpressed.

It was at this awkward point for Corder that the prisoners were summoned from their underground cells in the Covent Garden watchhouse to give their account of how they had come to be in possession of the boy’s body. They entered the crowded room at the Unicorn to be viewed by a fascinated public; the memory of the crimes committed by William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh just three years earlier was fresh. Had similar events been occurring in the English capital? And what would these monsters look like? Very ordinary indeed; your common or garden Londoner. John Bishop was thirty-three, stocky, slightly sullenlooking but with a mild enough expression; he had a long, slender, pointed nose, high cheekbones, large, slightly protruding grey-green eyes and thick, dark hair that continued down into bushy, mutton-chop sideburns which covered a good deal of his cheeks. James May, thirty, was tall a...

Towards the end of 1831, the authorities unearthed a series of crimes at Number 3, Nova Scotia Gardens in East London that appeared to echo the notorious Burke and Hare killings in Edinburgh three years earlier. After a long investigation, it became known that a group of body snatchers - two men in particular, John Bishop and Thomas Williams, called the 'London Burkers' - were supplying the anatomy schools with fresh 'examples' for dissection.

The case became known as 'The Italian Boy' and caused a furore which led directly to the passing of controversial legislation which marked the beginning of the end of body snatching in Britain. The case revealed something else as well: some extremely unpleasant aspects of life in London, a city that had increased in size by one-third to over one-and-a-half million inhabitants between 1801 and 1831, and which was continuing to expand at a phenomenal and unprecedented rate. In The Italian Boy, Sarah Wise not only investigates the case of the London Burkers but also, by making use of an incredibly rich archival store, the lives of ordinary lower-class Londoners.

She shows how the case challenged their notions of community and criminality, and how it made many feel that at the heart of their great city lay unknown, unknowable mysteries. Here is a window on the lives of the poor - a window which is opaque in places, shattered in others - but which provides an unprecedented view of low-life London in the 1830s.