by Sarah Wise
Since this data appeared in what was essentially a booklet appealing for funds, the attempt at categorization and quantification was no doubt supposed to impress potential sponsors. After the report’s figures come some brief notes on certain of the Dicity Objects of 1830:
“JT,” wife, four children, no job, good character, had sold all belongings and was begging;
“WR,” 38, a failed Oxford Street linen-draper with debts, friends helped but they were in trouble too, on the streets;
“MD”’s husband a long-term hospital patient, he had been a manservant, Irish, good character;
“WS,” 39, discharged lieutenant and now a failed artist, a wife, four children, starving in an empty garret with not even a bed;
“JG,” 39, a Manchester manufactory lad, induced to seek fortune in London, abandoned by his pals, he was returned to his grateful parents in Salford;
a failed umbrella maker, 31, of Liverpool, came to London but he and his wife and two children were begging in Covent Garden, could only get casual shifts at the dock;
“JH,” 27, of Birmingham, was found with a placard “Obligation! Myself, my wife and two children are nearly starving in a land of plenty! My wife wants bread, my children pine and cry, Kind reader, pray a mite impart as you pass by.”23
The Dicity was a tantalizing mixture of narrow-minded judgmentalism punctuated by outbursts of compassion and even sentimentality; in its publications, skeptical comments about beggars’ claims of unemployment do battle with exclamations on how dreadful the state of the labor market had been of late. In 1830, one-third of vagrancy cases brought before London magistrates were the result of arrests made by Dicity workers.24
The London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity had come into being not to help the poor but to ensure that as many vagrants were apprehended and prosecuted as the law allowed. The term used in its literature for the activities of its constables is “clearing the streets”—that is, seeing to it that public places were free from the sights, sounds, and smells of extreme poverty.
Many vagrants did nevertheless go to Red Lion Square of their own accord, to seek shelter, food, or safety. One such was a twelve-year-old native of Parma, in northern Italy, who had been seen around the streets of central London carrying a wax doll in a wooden box. He was in dreadful physical condition; his skin was covered in scabs, his eyes were infected—probably a result of scurvy—and his face was bruised. In April 1834 he went to the Dicity and told its officers that he was too frightened to go back to his lodgings in Vine Street, off Saffron Hill, in Little Italy. He said that he had been beaten by the man he worked for, Alexander Ronchatti, because he had failed to bring back enough money from his begging; Ronchatti also “employed” two other boys to go out into the street to beg, said the boy. When questioned through an interpreter, Ronchatti denied the boy’s story, saying that the child had absconded from his lodgings with the doll, which belonged to Ronchatti. The Dicity officer on duty claimed to have witnessed such a scene before, where an Italian running a troupe of beggar boys had used an interpreter to lie and cover up for him. However, Ronchatti was discharged, after being admonished via the interpreter. The boy was given into the care of the Italian ambassador’s staff. Only the doll was arrested—it was impounded by the Dicity, being worth three pounds.25
It was a telling incident. By the 1830s, a separate group of vagrant children had emerged, combining the role of entertainer and outcast and catering to that hunger for spectacle that saw people flock to the flimsiest, makeshift, unlicensed theatrical performances (“penny gaffs”) and to horse-drawn caravan shows featuring midgets, bizarre animals, waxworks, and people with unusual deformities—even to gawk at the oranges and pineapples and other exotic fruit when their season arrived at Covent Garden market.26 To a population with little access to books or periodicals, and no access to parks, zoos, galleries, or museums—forbidden to them by price and by social exclusivity—Italian boys brought music, pathos, intriguing objects, and strange animals, plus, in many cases, their own physical beauty, to some of London’s grimmest streets. The imaginative life of the poor was kept from starvation by such humble food.
Caravan shows and puppet booths attracted adults as well as children, despite a crackdown on street noise and “nuisance” in London.
* * *
The economies of the Italian states had been devastated by the Napoleonic Wars; some northern regions experienced famine in 1816 and 1817, while political repression was common in the disputed areas of Piedmont and Savoy, which bordered France. (Savoy would be ceded to France in 1860; Piedmont to Italy.) There was large-scale migration throughout the 1820s, with many Italian artisans moving to northern European cities to pursue their trades. In London, Italians were renowned for their skill in manufacturing optical devices—spectacles, telescopes, barometers—musical instruments, puppets, and waxworks. They introduced to Britain fantoccini, grotesque puppets in elaborate costume; grown men were observed to collapse into giggles at fantoccini performances in booths at street corners.27 The wax and plaster artists, the figurinai, came mainly from Lucca in Tuscany and settled in Holborn and Covent Garden. While later in the century Italian street children would be known for playing instruments and dancing, until the mid-1830s their principal source of income was exhibiting small animals as well as wax and plaster figures. There was a good trade in silk or paper flowers to which wax birds were attached; busts of literary and theatrical greats, as well as military and naval heroes, would be transported on large trays carried on an image boy’s head, as a walking advertisement for the figurinaio who had created them, while an image boy’s boîtes à curiosité included anatomical wax models, notably a copy of a sketch of recently stillborn Siamese twins who had been dissected by anatomists. Let the rhymester responsible for “The Image Boy,” in the January 1829 issue of the New Monthly Magazine, explain:
Who’er has trudged, on frequent feet,
From Charing Cross to Ludgate Street,
That haunt of noise and wrangle,
Has seen on journeying through the Strand,
A foreign Image-vendor stand
Near Somerset’s quadrangle.
His coal-black eye, his balanced walk,
His sable apron, white with chalk,
His listless meditation,
His curly locks, his sallow cheeks,
His board of celebrated Greeks,
Proclaim his trade and nation.
Not on that board, as erst, are seen
A tawdry troop; our gracious Queen
With tresses like a carrot,
A milk-maid with a pea-green pail,
A poodle with a golden tail,
John Wesley, and a parrot.
No, far more classic is his stock;
With ducal Arthur, Milton, Locke,
He bears, unconscious roamer,
Alcmena’s Jove-begotten Son,
Cold Abelard’s too tepid Nun,
And pass-supported Homer.
……………………
Poor vagrant child of want and toil!
The sun that warms thy native soil
Has ripen’d not thy knowledge;
’Tis obvious, from that vacant air,
Though Padua gave thee birth, thou ne’er
Didst graduate in her College.
’Tis true thou nam’st thy motley freight;
But from what source their birth they date,
Mythology or history,
Old records, or the dreams of youth,
Dark fable, or transparent truth,
Is all to thee a mystery.
But it wasn’t all poets and philosophers. Exhibiting creatures that were highly unusual to London eyes could prove lucrative too, and one Italian boy, “PG,” arrested by the Dicity in 1826 while entertaining a passerby with his dancing monkey, was found to be carrying £21 7s and 6d.28 Beasts for display included white mice, guinea pigs, monkeys (uniformed or “naked”), tortoises, porcupines—even a marmot, a gro
undhog native to the mountains of the Savoy region. The objects and creatures were rented out to the boys each morning by the men who ran the trade, at these daily rates:
Box of wax Siamese twins
2s
Organ with waltzing figures
3s 6d
Porcupine
2s 6d
Organ
1s 6d
Organ plus porcupine
4s
Monkey in a uniform
3s
Monkey without uniform
2s
Box of white mice
1s 6d
Tortoise
1s 6d
Monkey on a dog’s back
3s
Four dancing dogs, in costume, with pipe and tabor
5s29
It was said that one happy outcome of the 1824 Vagrancy Act was a reduction in the practice of beggars waving their deformities in the face of the public; what had arisen in its place was an appeal to sympathy, with plaintive looks and an air of patient submission becoming more prevalent among those with a regular pitch. Italian boys were indeed pitiful—victims of organized child-trafficking by their fellow countrymen. The so-called padroni (“masters,” “owners,” or “employers,” also called proveditori, “providers”) paid a sum of money to impoverished peasants in rural, mainly northern Italy in return for the services of their son—a sort of beggars’ apprenticeship.30 The parents were told that their child was being taken abroad to learn a trick or skill, usually theatrical in nature, which would earn him a living. The parents’ (dialect) term for their son’s fate was “È peo mondo co a commedia,” which translated as “He is wandering the world with a theater company”; in reality, once the child had been walked through France to England, he would find himself a virtual slave to his padrone.
The Italian boy trade stretched across Britain: Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bradford, Glasgow, Brighton, and Worthing were all home to padroni. In London, whole houses in the Holborn area—in Saffron Hill, Vine Street, Eyre Street, Greville Street, Bleeding Heart Yard—as well as the streets around the southern end of Drury Lane were taken over by padroni, and boys were packed into dormitories, for which they were charged four pence a night. The animals belonged to the padroni, who joined into syndicates, owning una zampa per uno—“a paw apiece.” The boys, who often learned little English during their stay, were instructed to tell anyone who asked that the padrone was their uncle or much older brother and to provide false names for themselves and the padrone. Procuring a child to solicit alms was a breach of the Vagrancy Act, after all, but little action appears to have been taken against the padroni until certain notorious assaults and deaths later in the century.31
Some Italian boys exhibited exotic animals.
Londoners appear to have felt sentimental about Italian boys/image boys/white mice boys, with their dark, imploring eyes, sweet, melancholy expressions, and picturesque destitution. In a curious case in 1834, Lord Dudley Coutts Stuart, Whig member of Parliament and “champion of the oppressed” (according to his obituarists), announced that he would personally request the home secretary to secure the release of two Italian boys sentenced to two weeks in prison by magistrates White and Burrell at the Queen Square magistrates office, Holborn. Metropolitan Police constables Simpson and Brockway of B Division (Westminster) had arrested Antonio Loniski and Barnard Malvarham, both aged about fourteen, for begging in Wilton Street, Pimlico—close to Stuart’s residence—at three o’clock in the afternoon of Easter Monday; one boy had a monkey, the other a cage of white mice. The magistrates had jailed them for committing an offense under the Vagrancy Act, and the court sold off the animals to help pay the boys’ prison costs. On hearing the news, Stuart went straight to the Queen Square justices to explain that the boys had been two of a party of nine Italian entertainers invited by him to an Easter feast at his London home and that they had simply been waiting outside his house for the door to be answered. Stuart’s footman had told the constables this, he said, but they had still taken the boys into custody. Stuart failed to free the boys, and he left the court declaring his intention to petition Lord Melbourne for their release.32
It is possible that Loniski and Malvarham were arrested, while the other seven Italians were not, because they were not playing instruments; if playing could be defined as “skilful,” the Vagrancy Act did not apply—or rather, it might have made a police officer unsure of his grounds for arrest. Displaying animals involved very little skill and left the child more vulnerable to arrest, which may be why from the 1840s on it was more common for Italian street children to play music and dance for money than exhibit animals. “If they are considered vagrants, they are the most inoffensive and amusing vagrants,” declared journalist Charles MacFarlane of Italian boys. “No offences or crimes are committed, despite their poverty and youth.” In any case, MacFarlane added, such entertainments were probably good for the lower orders, being instructive and educational: “They propagate a taste for the fine arts … and [their] animals may awaken an interest in natural history.” Fellow journalist Charles Knight agreed, writing in 1841, “We have some fears that the immigration of Italian boys is declining. We do not see the monkey and the white mice so often as we could wish to do.… What if he be but the commonest of monkeys? Is he not amusing? Does he not come with a new idea into our crowded thoroughfares, of distant lands where all is not labor and traffic? These Italian boys, with their olive cheeks and white teeth—they are something different from your true London boy of the streets, with his mingled look of cunning and insolence.”33
Many Italian immigrants made a living as itinerant musicians.
All in all, Italy was providing London with a better class of vagrant. The pathos an Italian boy evoked could earn his master six or seven shillings a day. Dead—and apparently murdered to supply the surgeons—his appeal seemed only to increase.
FIVE
Systematic Slaughter
At daybreak on Saturday, 19 November, the body of the dead boy was exhumed. He had been buried (described in the register of burials as “A Boy Unknown”) on the eleventh in the graveyard of St. Pancras workhouse, which served as the spillover burial ground for St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and was where the poorest of the parish were destined.1 (Later, there would be criticism that the subject of an ongoing criminal case had been buried so swiftly, the Lancet medical journal pointing to the decision as one more example of the incompetence of coroners.) Augustine Brun, an elderly Birmingham-based padrone named by Joseph Paragalli as the dead boy’s master, had been brought to London to view the corpse. This, along with other new evidence that had come to light, so excited George Rowland Minshull that he convened a special hearing for the Italian Boy case at Bow Street, on Monday, 21 November. Joseph Paragalli acted as Brun’s interpreter to the magistrates.
Brun revealed that he had brought a boy called Carlo Ferrari to England from northern Italy in the late autumn of 1829; though from Piedmont, Carlo was a Savoyard, said Brun. His father, Joseph, had signed Carlo over to Brun for a fee. Brun had had charge of the boy for his first nine months in England, though Carlo had lodged at the house of another man, called Elliott, at 2 Charles Street, just south of Bow Street.
In the summer of 1830, Brun had bound Carlo over to a new master, an Italian called Charles Henoge who played the hurdy-gurdy and exhibited monkeys, for a period of two years and one month, and, as far as Brun knew, the new master had taken Carlo to Bristol. Carlo would now be about fifteen years old, Brun believed. (The Globe and Traveller newspaper report has Brun additionally claiming, “The poor boy ran away from his master about a year ago,” and that Carlo made sure that he left London whenever this particular padrone—presumably Henoge, though the newspaper does not make this clear—was rumored to be coming to the capital.)2
As soon as the coffin lid came off at the St. Pancras workhouse, Brun was reported to have exclaimed, “Mon pauvre garçon, pauvre Carlo, mon pauvre garçon.” This see
ms odd: if Brun had spoken French, Paragalli would not have been the only person who could have acted as his translator. Even odder was Brun’s subsequent statement to the magistrates that he had been unable to identify the dead boy because of the extent to which the body had decomposed. The child was green, and the facial features were disfigured; the attentions of the surgeons at the postmortem had not helped matters either. Brun said he believed the hair color and stature of the dead boy were similar to Carlo’s. He added that Carlo had been a well-known figure in the squares of the West End of London and that his customary phrase—in French, though he was an Italian boy—was “Donnez un louis, signor.” (Short for un louis d’or, a gold coin with a value of twenty francs. Presumably the word was used figuratively—twenty gold sovereigns was a steep price to pay for a look at white mice.) Superintendent Joseph Sadler Thomas now revealed that the corpse had a number of warts on its left hand, and he asked Brun whether Carlo Ferrari had had such blemishes. Brun replied that the hand had been too green for him to tell if there were any warts on it—not the question he had been asked.
Vestry clerk James Corder, however, was quite satisfied with Brun’s evidence, telling the magistrates court that it was clear to him that Brun had identified the boy as his former charge, Carlo Ferrari, since Brun had been unable to stop crying since viewing the corpse—itself a rather extraordinary claim. Corder added that Margaret King had also been taken to see the exhumed corpse—a pointlessly distressing exercise, since King had admitted that she had not seen the boy’s face on the day he appeared in Nova Scotia Gardens; King, sure enough, was unable to identify the dead boy.