The Italian Boy (51 page)

Authors: Sarah Wise

18
. The phrase is that of 1828 Smithfield Select Committee witness Michael Scales (
Report of the 1828 Select Committee on the State of Smithfield Market
, p. 129).

19
. Quoted in
Old and New London
, ed. Walter Thornbury (1879–85), vol. 2, p. 350. Aleph’s original column appeared in the
City Press
newspaper.
The city fog of those years—the True London Particular—had a taste and smell, too, according to the writer of “The Mirror of the Months” in 1831: “There is something tangible in a London fog.… You can feel what you breathe and see it too.… The taste of it, when dashed with a due seasoning of sea-coal smoke, is far from insipid. It is also meat and drink at the same time, something between an egg flip and omelette soufflé, but much more digestible than either” (reprinted in the
Weekly Dispatch
, 13 November 1831).

20
. After the Act of Union of 1801, Irish MPs sat in Westminster. Main sources of information on Richard Martin:
Humanity Dick
by Shevawn Lynam (1975),
Richard Martin
by Wellesley Pain (1925),
Valiant Crusade
by A. W. Moss (1961), and
A Century of Work for Animals
by E. Fairholme and Wellesley Pain (1924).

21
. After losing all his spare change at cockfighting at Hockley-in-the-Hole, Saffron Hill, George IV turned up at the Castle inn, on the corner of Cowcross Street and Turnmill Street, and pledged his watch and chain to pay off his gaming debts. As a favor to the obliging landlord, the pub was granted a license to receive pledges as well as sell alcohol, a unique honor. Today, the Castle still has its pawnbroker status, plus a highly flattering portrait of George IV standing at the bar, to commemorate his visit.

22
. Today, Portcullis House is near the spot. Dickens describes the gloomy decrepitude of Manchester Buildings in
Nicholas Nickleby
, ch. 16.

23
. Pain,
Richard Martin
, p. 91.

24
. Reported in
François Magendie
by J. M. D. Olmsted (1944), p. 140.

25
. Bell and Magendie quotations, ibid., pp. 93, 117–18.

26
. From the
Lancet;
quoted in Isobel Rae’s
Knox: The Anatomist
(1964), p. 17.

27
. Fairholme and Pain,
A Century of Work for Animals,
pp. 35–36.

28
. The name has nothing to do with killing; the inn’s first landlord, in 1692, was Thomas Slaughter. Slaughter’s stood on the southwest corner of the junction with Cranbourn Street—today a coffee/sandwich chain has the site.

29
.
1828 Report on Smithfield Market
, p. 48.

30
. Richard Martin, however, was the son of a Roman Catholic but had been brought up in the Protestant faith so that he might go to Cambridge and then enter Parliament; Catholics were not allowed to sit as MPs until 1829.

31
.
Cursory Remarks on the Evil Tendency of Unrestrained Cruelty, Particularly on That Practised at Smithfield Market
, pp. 7–12.

32
. Recalled by Percy Fitzgerald in his
Chronicles of a Bow Street Police Officer
(1888).

33
. The phrase is from the anonymous pamphlet
Smithfield and the Slaughterhouses
(1847), p. 6.

34
. The wiping out of slums was not to be the main thrust of nineteenth-century metropolitan improvements, but it was viewed as a highly desirable side effect. Rundown districts were almost always the location for new roads and railway lines, since low-grade housing stock was the cheapest to buy up for demolition.

35
. George Godwin,
Town Swamps and Social Bridges
(1859), p. 13. Frying Pan Alley disappeared during the construction of Clerkenwell Road in 1878.

36
. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Fourth Session, 1827, p. 323; evidence of James Spoor.

37
. It is, though, impossible now: it lies approximately where the Underground runs alongside Farringdon Road, on a latitude with Benjamin Street.

Chapter Nine: Whatever Has Happened to Fanny?

1
. “The Diseased Appetite for Horrors,”
Examiner
, 11 December 1831, p. 787; reprinted in Fontblanque’s
England Under Seven Administrations
(1837).

2
. Harmer (1777–1853) was the orphan of a Spitalfields weaver and rose to become a wealthy attorney. He would be elected alderman of the City ward of Farringdon Without in 1833 and became a sheriff of London and Middlesex and proprietor of the campaigning newspaper the
Weekly Dispatch
. He was a prolific pamphleteer on the subject of criminal-law reform and is the most likely candidate for author of the anonymous 1832 account of the Bishop and Williams case,
The History of the London Burkers
, which relies heavily on the
Times
’s account of the investigation. Harmer had already published a number of reformist pamphlets arising from his intimate knowledge of some of London’s most notable trials of the day, including those of John Holloway and Owen Haggerty, hanged for murder in 1807, though they may have been innocent. Harmer knew personally the Reverend Dr. Cotton, the vicar—or “ordinary”—of Newgate, and this may have given him greater access to the accused and the condemned.
I also believe Harmer to be the author of the anonymous book
Old Bailey Experience: Criminal Jurisprudence and the Actual Working of Our Penal Code of Laws
(1833), which has variously been attributed to John Wontner (governor of Newgate Prison) and Edward Gibbon Wakefield (who worked as a schoolmaster in Newgate during his three-year sentence for eloping with an heiress and who wrote the influential
Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis
, published in 1831). Close reading shows that both Wontner and Wakefield were robustly criticized for their views on penal matters in
Old Bailey Experience
. The author of
Old Bailey Experience
also mentions that he met James May at Newgate, which suggests the likelihood of his being the author of
The History of the London Burkers
as well.

3
. Two days later, James Gardener, a cart driver, of Caroline Place, Lambeth, was charged with assaulting White and of attacking another boy, fourteen-year-old Thomas Hammond, in Webber Street, Waterloo, at eleven o’clock at night. Gardener denied the pitch-plaster attack on White but admitted grabbing Hammond by the wrists, saying he had been so drunk he could remember nothing about the incident (
Globe and Traveller
, 25 November 1831).

4
. Henry Edward case,
Morning Advertiser
, 22 November 1831; Martha Allenby and Henry Fore cases,
Morning Advertiser
, 2 December 1831; Elizabeth Turner case,
Globe and Traveller
, 15 November 1831.

5
.
Globe and Traveller
, 1 December 1831.

6
.
Weekly Dispatch
, 11 December 1831. Details of the Culkin case are taken from the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Second Session, 1832, pp. 178–84. Hartshorn Court is no more; Broad Arrow Court is today’s Milton Court.

7
. The
Morning Advertiser
of 12 December 1831 carried a news story that is fairly typical of the style in which such cases were reported: “J Moore, an old and deformed pauper, who walks on crutches, and who has been frequently before the magistrates for various outrages and assaults, was charged with committing a series of the most indecent attacks on several little girls in Shadwell workhouse. The evidence against the prisoner was wholly unfit for publication.” An “outrage” was one of the contemporary euphemisms for rape.
Sexual assaults within the family were openly reported too. The
Morning Chronicle
of 11 October 1829 published the case of Alexander Barry, in his fifties, who was taken to court by his nineteen-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, on a charge of attempted rape; she said that he had been “repeatedly taking liberties with [her] person” since she was six years old. Joseph Woodhouse, meanwhile, “a fiend in human shape,” was executed at Chester for raping his eleven-year-old daughter (
Morning Chronicle
, 29 September 1829).

8
.
Times
, 28 November 1831;
Morning Advertiser
, 28 November 1831.

9
. These tiny streets are largely given over to the auto trade now, with garages, repair shops, and a large parking lot.

10
. Bransby Cooper in
The Life of Sir Astley Cooper
, pp. 374–76.

11
. John Flint South (1797–1882) had succeeded Sir Astley Cooper as demonstrator of anatomy on the baronet’s retirement in 1825. Apparently “deeply religious” (according to his entry in
Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians of England
), South retired early, in 1841, “due to neurosis.” South’s professional reminiscences,
Memorials of the Craft of Surgery
(1886), contain little on his dealings with resurrectionists.

12
. This large coaching inn stood on the northern corner with Camomile Street and was demolished in 1863 for architect John Gibson’s stunning National Provincial Bank, which still stands today, as Gibson Hall.

13
. Pilcher (1801–55) was a practicing surgeon and an ear specialist.

Chapter Ten: A Horrid System

1
. The Great Windmill Street School was founded in 1737 and closed in 1835; in 1878 the building was reconstructed as part of the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. Interestingly, the rear of Joseph Carpue’s anatomy school at 72 Dean Street, Soho, was also incorporated into a theater, when, in 1840, a Miss Kelly built the Royalty next door. (Carpue had vacated his school in 1833.) In 1845, Charles Dickens performed at Miss Kelly’s theater in Ben Jonson’s
Every Man in His Humour
. It is likely that Dickens knew of the building’s history, since as a child he had been a regular visitor to the house, at 10 Gerrard Street, Soho, of his maternal uncle Thomas Culliford Barrow, when Barrow was laid up with a broken thigh during the winter of 1822–23. Eventually, the leg had to be amputated, and it was taken off by Carpue in the Dean Street school. Barrow fainted during the operation, and Dickens’s family lore had it that when he came round, he asked, “Where’s my leg?” and was told by Carpue, “Under the table” (“The Barber of Dean Street” by William J. Carlton in
Dickensian
48, part 1, no. 301 [1952]: 8).