The Italian Boy

by Sarah Wise

  Richard Partridge and George Beaman explained to the coroner and his jury their findings at the postmortem. Although they disagreed on the details, both men found that death had been caused by a blow to the back of the neck, probably with a stick or some other implement. The wound on the boy’s temple was superficial, they agreed.

  * * *

  At half past ten on the evening of Thursday, 10 November, the foreman of the coroner’s jury returned the verdict: “We find a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown, and the jury beg to add to the above verdict that the evidence produced before them has excited very strong suspicion in their minds against the prisoners Bishop and Williams, and that they trust that a strict inquiry will be made into the case by the police magistrates.” No mention was made of May.

  A juror stood up to praise Superintendent Thomas; the jury foreman added his praise for the policeman and also praised vestry clerk James Corder; the coroner praised Corder, and Corder thanked the jury and praised the coroner.

  * * *

  The apparent similarities to the Burke and Hare murders, and the deep embarrassment that case had caused the medical and legal professions, had prompted Home Secretary Viscount Melbourne to request James Corder to forward the verdict and a report of the coroner’s hearing to him as quickly as possible. This Corder did, at eleven o’clock at night in a hand-delivered letter, apologizing for disturbing his lordship at such a late hour but saying that his urgency was due to the fact that “the enquiry into the present case has been the means of eliciting the fact that several boys of a similar age to the deceased have recently been missed by their friends, and there is too much ground for justifying the conclusion that they have, with him, been the victims of a horrid system carried on for some time past by wretches whose business it is to supply the hospitals.”11 Outside Corder’s office, in the dark and the freezing fog of November, beneath the stalls and in among the fruit and vegetable baskets of Covent Garden’s market building, some hundred or so destitute boys and girls were bedding down for the night.

  TWO

  Persons Unknown

  John Bishop had been a resurrection man for twelve years; James May had started to disturb the dead in 1825, acquiring the nickname Jack Stirabout (slang for “prison,” after the maize and oatmeal staple jail diet) and a string of convictions for grave robbery; Thomas Williams was new to the trade, having recently emerged from a prison sentence for theft; Michael Shields was a familiar face around the graveyards of central London. Resurrection was a revolting but potentially highly lucrative trade, with earnings way beyond those of even the most highly skilled worker. In 1831, a silk weaver in the East End of London could earn as little as five shillings a week working a twelve-hour day, six days a week.1 A well-paid manservant to a wealthy London household could expect to earn a guinea a week, which was also the starting wage for the first constables recruited to the Metropolitan “New” Police force in 1829. By contrast, a disinterred body could bring in between eight and twenty guineas, depending on its freshness and on how many Things were being hawked around London’s four hospital medical schools and seventeen private anatomy schools in any given week.2 It was a speculative trade, and John Bishop himself missed out on more than one occasion by failing to procure promptly a corpse for a surgeon who went ahead and bought one from a rival who had delivered more quickly. There were periodic gluts as well as lulls: the work was largely seasonal, since the hospital schools ran courses from October to April, though many private lecturers held summer classes.

  Male corpses were more highly prized than female because they offered greater scope for the study of musculature, while a fresh, well-developed limb could be worth more than a whole body that was on the verge of putrefaction. Other “offcuts”—a woman’s scalp with long, thick hair attached; unchipped teeth (“grinders”), either singly or as whole sets—were profitable sidelines for the resurrectionist as the living paid well to patch themselves up from parts of the dead. High infant mortality resulted in a brisk trade in children, either as “big smalls,” “smalls,” or fetuses. Specialty corpses achieved higher-than-average prices: in the autumn of 1827, when a young female inmate of an insane asylum succumbed at last to a long illness, William Davis, a member of the notorious Spitalfields Gang of snatchers, was offered twenty guineas by surgeons keen to anatomize her brain; but Davis was arrested by a parish watchman as he was digging up the corpse in a private burial ground in Golden Lane.3

  There were around eight hundred medical students in London in 1831, of whom five hundred dissected corpses as part of their anatomical education; each student was said to require three bodies during his sixteen-month training—two for learning anatomy, one for learning operating techniques.4 The only legal supply of flesh came from the gallows, with the corpses of those executed for murder being made available to the nation’s surgeons. But the number of murderers being executed was far too low to meet the needs of an expanding, research-hungry medical profession. Death sentences for any crime were increasingly unlikely to be carried out as the Bloody Code of the eighteenth century—a series of legal enactments that introduced capital punishment for a wide range of petty theft and antisocial acts—was diminished by wave upon wave of legislation.5 However, the concurrent rise in arrests and convictions guaranteed that the number of those executed held steady. Thus, while 350 death sentences were passed in England and Wales in 1805, only 68 people were executed (10 for murder); in 1831, 1,601 people were condemned to death, yet only 52 were executed (12 for murder).6 And so the anatomists and their students relied on the “snatchers,” “grabs,” “lifters,” “exhumators,” or “resurgam homos” to make up the numbers.

  Digging up the dead in overcrowded city graveyards was physically arduous, but an exhumation could be completed in as little as half an hour by the well-practiced. Resurrection men would also travel to outlying villages to retrieve corpses. Just as livestock, vegetables, herbs, and milk were imported daily into the capital and touted around the streets by itinerant sellers, the country dead were regularly ferried into town on covered “go-carts.” A network of informers passed details to the London gangs of an impending death or recent burial in villages and hamlets, with corrupt sextons, gravediggers, undertakers, and local officials taking a cut of the sale price. The Wednesday before his arrest, James May had just got back from the country, where he had been disinterring the rural dead; on the Thursday, he had failed to make a sale of his two dead rustics at Grainger’s, but Guy’s took them off his hands for ten guineas each.

  Another, increasingly popular method of obtaining Things—and one that could involve the womenfolk of resurrectionists—was to pose as the friend or relative of a dying pauper, one who was too ill to alert workhouse or hospital staff to the imposture; the corpse would then be signed over for private burial (the institution being glad to be free of the cost of interment). This grotesque vigil might last for days, but after the pauper’s death, the resurrectionist could take possession of the body with every appearance of respectability and peddle it to a surgeon for dissection. A variation on this theme was demonstrated in March 1830 in Walworth, then a village in south London. One Miss Christy had been unwell for some time and her health was deteriorating rapidly. As she lay in her sickbed, a gang of known resurrectionists could be spotted lurking near her home. When she died, Miss Christy was buried in the graveyard of St. John’s chapel, West Lane, Walworth. But a day later, a police officer stopped a man carrying a sack in a street near the chapel, and it was found to contain Miss Christy. An inquest was held at a local inn, and here another pair of resurrectionists sat at the back of the room, trying to pass themselves off as relatives waiting to claim Miss Christy’s body when the coroner had finished with her remains. Enraged locals had them ejected from the hearing, and when Miss Christy was again laid to rest, her friends pledged to keep watch at the grave until such time as she would be too putrid to be saleable.7

  The Bodysnatcher by Morris Meredith Willia
ms, 1913; in fact, disinterment was just one of several ways in which resurrectionists obtained corpses.

  Even more opportunistic, or impatient, snatchers would simply steal a corpse that was known to be in a family home awaiting burial. On Saturday, 15 October 1831, Thomas Williams used a crowbar to open the door of a house very near to his Nova Scotia Gardens home and made off with the body of fourteen-year-old William Sullivan, who had died, after a long illness, a day or two before. The boy’s mother, a widow, had gone out on an errand, leaving him lying in his coffin on the kitchen table. Neighbors saw a man passing by carrying a large, stinking basket; because of the smell, they took particular care to note the man’s face (though it is interesting that none had the temerity to challenge him). When Mrs. Sullivan returned and raised the alarm, the neighbors’ description was so precise that a police officer arrested Williams the next day. He was identified by the witnesses, but since the boy’s body could not be found and no other evidence was offered, the local magistrate dismissed the charge.8 Dissection disfigured and eventually destroyed corpses, a process that provided resurrectionists with their best chance of avoiding prosecution. No body, no evidence; no evidence, no case.

  Some snatchers were so confident that they felt no need to be circumspect. At the funeral of a dustman at St. Andrew’s Church in Holborn, on 29 December 1828, snatchers mingled with the huge crowd of white-jacketed fellow dustmen. The deceased, who had died in an accident, had been a very popular man; the white jackets were a sign of respect. His widow had already been approached by resurrectionists offering to buy the body from her; since she had refused to sell, they determined to “izzey” (steal) it in a stunningly brazen manner. They staggered drunkenly into the church and swore and blasphemed throughout the service; they then hovered by the graveside as the coffin was lowered. None of the crowd remonstrated with or attacked the resurrectionists, but one friend of the dead man jumped down onto the coffin, calling to another, “Come, Bill, let’s squeeze the bugger down tight, and then he von’t be fit for the knife.” Another declared, “Ve’d better stop up at night and votch,” since they did not trust St. Andrew’s “votchman.”9

  At once close-knit and highly volatile, the resurrection trade had a tight network of meeting places. Certain pubs and inns operated as unofficial guild halls, where bodies could be stored and tips and warnings exchanged, and as houses of call for those indirectly involved in the trade (such as Michael Shields and, possibly, Thomas Wigley, the porter at the Cross Keys Inn). The hub of London resurrection culture north of the river was the Old Bailey, the thoroughfare that gave its name to the famous courthouse and that was just a few yards south of the Fortune of War and St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and medical school, which faced the pub. South of the river, the Bricklayer’s Arms and the Rockingham Arms were both handily situated for south London’s two large hospital medical schools—Guy’s and St. Thomas’s—and their private competitor, Grainger’s school in Webb Street. Such pubs were comparatively safe places for resurrection men to gather; here, they would not be subjected to the scorn of other working people. (When John Bishop and James May took tea in the King of Denmark, a nonresurrection pub, their presence caused something of a frisson.)

  No pub was more associated with the resurrectionists than the Fortune of War. It had originally been called the Naked Boy; in the seventeenth century, a tailor had run the pub, and his shop sign was a lad with no clothes on, with the inscription: “So fickle is our English nation / I would be clothed if I knew the fashion.” But the Naked Boy himself was inherited from an earlier age: shortly after the Fire of London in 1666, the Golden Boy of Pye Corner, a gilded wooden statue of a corpulent cherub, was “in Memmory Put up for the late Fire of London Occasion’d by the Sin of Gluttony.” In 1721, the Naked Boy was bought by a man who had lost both legs and one arm in a sea battle: the “fortune of war” was mutilation.10 How the pub fell into its role in the resurrection community is not known, though its proximity to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital is likely to have played a role in its transformation.

  In its day, the pub, which stood until 1910 at the northwest corner of the junction of Giltspur Street and Cock Lane, was said to have been so welcoming to snatchers that they would stash their stolen corpses, with tickets of ownership attached, on or under the pub’s benches while they went off to strike a bargain. But by 1828, it is likely that the trade had become so shameful, so vulnerable to public distaste and police action, that no produce was kept on site; certainly, John Bishop made no attempt to bring his wares to the pub.

  Outside such places, the resurrection man could expect to be reviled and ostracized by those he lived among and shunned, too, by strangers—shopkeepers, publicans, coachmen—who suspected his profession. Knowing this, resurrectionists wishing to take revenge on a rival would leave disfigured corpses or body parts festooned around the rival’s home to arouse the fury of the neighbors and possibly the attention of the police.11 From the mid-1820s, the work itself became more dangerous, with armed guards posted at many London graveyards as popular revulsion at the increasing incidence of body snatching grew. In the eyes of the law, however, resurrection was only a misdemeanor, not a felony. What was considered by the public one of the worst of crimes was, to lawmakers, comparatively trivial. The misdemeanor was “unlawful disinterment,” an act that breached “common decency,” according to a legal judgment of 1788, and was punishable by a fine, or up to six months in jail. The human body was deemed to belong to no one and therefore did not constitute property. For this reason, resurrection men were scrupulous about replacing shrouds and coffin lids, in order to avoid the more serious charge of theft.

  The Fortune of War resurrectionist pub shortly before demolition; the Golden Boy cherub commemorated the Great Fire of London.

  Magistrates—or “justices of the peace”—in some parts of London were said to be more inclined to convict and imprison resurrectionists toward the end of the 1820s, though there was a wide range of attitudes among even senior, long-serving JPs. Records of cases are rare for this period, just before the boom years of bureaucracy; newspaper reports and anecdotal evidence of magistrates’ hearings give a colorful though incomplete picture, so it is difficult to ascertain whether there really was a crackdown. In 1828, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Anatomy, convened to consider and instruct Parliament on the problems experienced by surgeons in obtaining corpses to dissect, reported that London magistrates had been coming down harder on the resurrection community. However, none of the justices of the peace who gave evidence to the committee corroborated this statement: Thomas Halls said he could remember presiding at only two resurrection cases in the previous seven years; Samuel Twyford was able to recall six in as many years, while the representative of the Thames police office claimed that he had never had a resurrectionist up before him.

  Several contemporary newspaper reports suggest that the newly formed Metropolitan Police were responsible for an increasing number of arrests—many of which, nevertheless, did not end in conviction.12 But if there really was an increase in police vigilance and a rise in the number of detentions, this may have reflected the taking into custody of part-time resurrectionists for perfectly ordinary thieving. Dr. James Somerville stated to the Select Committee on Anatomy that the majority of “resurrection” carts that were stopped by police were found to be carrying not exhumed corpses but the proceeds of housebreaking.13 Increasingly, resurrection was becoming a specialist’s field, where only the best-informed, most fearless, physically strong, discreet, and levelheaded men were able to farm the city’s dead on a full-time basis. The aging, the drunk, the boastful, and the careless were better advised to look elsewhere for a living.

  * * *

  Resurrection was one of the most covert underworld activities of the day, and tantalizingly little about it has ever come to light: the researcher continually hits a wall. A handwritten index card in the St. Bartholomew’s Hospital archives states baldly that “since obtaining bodies from resurr
ectionists was surreptitious, there are no written records of this process”; the minutes of meetings of senior staff at King’s College refer to various sums granted to the medical school, including fifty pounds to Richard Partridge on 31 October 1831 “received on account of the anatomical department”—its purpose not specified, unlike all the other sums of money mentioned in the minutes; and a biography of surgeon Sir Charles Bell contains a typical admission: “That Bell did business with these blackguards may be accepted, but with regard to that side of his affairs, information is scanty.”14 The Select Committee on Anatomy conducted interviews with three resurrection men—identified as “AB,” “CD,” and “FG”—and a number of the surgeons they supplied, and the committee’s report and evidence form a major part of what is known of the trade.15 Other glimpses of resurrection culture appear in the recollections, reminiscences, and memoirs of various medical men of the day—though such references are always hostile, with little interest shown in the everyday working lives of “the most iniquitous set of villains who ever lived.”16 It is not even clear how many resurrection men were at work in London in 1831. There may have been as many as seven London gangs, but with infighting a common feature of resurrection life, gangs were likely to have been constantly breaking up, re-forming, and disintegrating again—so a “gang” could at any point have comprised two men or as many as fifteen. The Select Committee believed that while there were around two hundred London resurrectionists, the vast majority of these were part-timers, making most of their living through more orthodox theft and dealing in bodies only if these came their way with ease. “They get a Subject or two and call themselves resurrectionists,” complained AB to the Select Committee, bitterly regretting the influx of “petty common thieves” who were ruining the business. The specialists—the men that a number of anatomists grudgingly admitted they could trust not to overcharge, cheat, blackmail, fail to deliver, or turn informer to magistrates—were thought to number around ten. It is quite possible, though unprovable, that John Bishop and James May were among this elite.