by Sarah Wise
Moderate
Benevolence
Very Small
Small
Veneration
Very Small
Moderate
Hope
Very Small
Small
Conscientiousness
Very Small
Very Small
Ideality
Small
Small
Firmness
Small
Small
Knowing faculties
Large
Large
Intellectual faculties
Small
Very Small
The opponents of “bumpology,” as they called it, claimed that there was no relation between cranium and brain and that misshapen skulls were the result of a number of perfectly mundane factors, such as a blow to the head or tight-fitting headwear for children. Much muck was raked in the battle of phrenology, with one often-repeated anecdote (never sourced) about a trainee of Gall’s who had disinterred his own mother to prove a point.7 Phrenology, though, was not a phenomenon that could be proved or disproved by advances in anatomy. Looking at dead matter, however brilliantly dissected, would not reveal how a brain, or brain faculties, worked. The soul, or spirit, could not be located, nor did there seem to be a way of demonstrating that it was merely the product of the nervous system. Discovering the essence of humankind—of life—was eluding those who wielded the scalpel.
While phrenology would decline into a parlor game by the 1860s, physiognomy—the observation and categorization of facial rather than cranial features—emerged into greater respectability as the nineteenth century wore on. It appeared to gain validity from the pioneering work of physiologists such as Herbert Mayo, Charles Bell, and vivisectionist François Magendie, who all helped to reveal the mysteries of facial muscle movement. Physiognomy had formerly been an illegal practice in England, undertaken by itinerant showmen who, in addition to reading “character” and future prospects from the faces of the credulous, might offer palm reading and the divination of omens, activities also outlawed by Puritans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and still illegal under the 1824 Vagrancy Act; but physiognomy was proving irresistible to the new society that was busy segregating itself into mutually exclusive groups. Anxiety about social flux could be allayed by typologizing and categorizing, and the need to feel certain about the “types” one was living among is likely to have been the driving force that made physiognomy increasingly prescriptive rather than merely descriptive, and nowhere more so than in the analysis of criminality. Thieves and prostitutes were said to know how to wear a “mask of decorum” by the late 1820s, where less than twenty years before, they had made little attempt to disguise who they were or what they did.8 Beggars could be as adept as Drury Lane actors in striking poses, adopting airs, drumming up pathos. The city dweller was becoming his or her own work of art; self-consciousness and self-presentation were becoming key.
But like phrenology, physiognomy was not innocent of eye; visual data were used to prove points already decided by other types of evidence. So Thomas Williams was described, after his death, as having a “coarse and vulgar physiognomy,… a low, designing brow, a harsh severity of features.”9 But before the guilty verdict, it was the very ordinariness of the prisoners’ appearance that had been commented on. At that point, the worst that had been said of any of the three was that Williams looked “cunning” (Times), though the same newspaper had also claimed that he looked “inoffensive—simple even,” while Bishop had never appeared worse than “sullen.” Yet a week after the executions, having viewed the sketches of the Bow Street and Old Bailey hearings published by printer Charles Tilt, the Times decided: “May looks more stupid, perhaps, than vicious, and yet his countenance is extremely revolting. The face of Williams exhibits the same attempt at disguise as is apparent in his costume, and an equal failure attends both: the metropolitan blackguard is not concealed by the countryman’s smock frock, and the brutality of his nature breaks through the affected sheepishness which he put on for the occasion. Bishop is rather more like a hog than a human being, and there is no attempt on his part to soften the harsh character with which Nature has branded him.”10 Except that it was Bishop who wore the smock frock, not Williams—the picture had been wrongly labeled by Tilt.
But as late as 1883, plaster casts of Bishop’s and Williams’s heads were being advertised as “suitable for public or private museums, literary or scientific institutions,” along with the heads of Oliver Cromwell, “the Idiot of Amsterdam,” Coleridge, Sir Isaac Newton, William Palmer the Poisoner, and the five idiot progeny of one Mrs. Hillings; they cost a mere five shillings each, or forty shillings for a dozen.11
* * *
No death portrait had ever been circulated of the dead child of King’s College, and so the publishers of broadsheets and ballads were free to make up their own minds about how the victim of the Bethnal Green Tragedy might have looked. London was in love with its Poor Italian Boy, and he was memorialized in many catchpenny prints—often as a corpulent little chap with an insipid grin beneath a hugely exaggerated furry cap—while doggerel poured from hack poets’ pens. “The Italian Savoyard Boy,” for example, by one F. W. N. Bayly, appeared in the Weekly Dispatch:
Poor child of Venice! He had left
A land of love and sun for this;
In one brief day of tears bereft,
Of father’s care and mother’s kiss!
The valleys of his native home,
The mountain paths of light and flow’rs;
The Savoyard forsook, to roam
For wealth and happiness in ours.
And pitying thousands saw the boy,
Feeding the tortoise on his knee;
And beauty bright, and childhood coy,
Oft flung their mite of charity.
And as he rested on the stone,
His organ tun’d to some old air!
Men paus’d at its familiar tone,
And left their little tokens there.
Et cetera.
In a similar way, The Trial and Execution of the Burkers for Murdering a Poor Italian Boy, a broadsheet produced by the most successful of cheap publishers, James Catnach (and so shoddily cobbled together that it reports James May being executed), contains this verse:
’Tis of a poor Italian Boy, whose fate we now deplore,
Who wandered from his native land unto old England’s shore;
White mice within his box confin’d he slung across his breast,
And friendless, for his daily bread, through London streets he prest.
From the cheapest broadsheet to the Times and the Houses of Parliament, it was decided that the Italian Boy case had revealed London, the world’s wealthiest city, failing in the duties of care that its superiority forced upon it. That a nation as great as Britain had let down a young stranger from another land provoked much striking of attitudes. A Times editorial on 10 November fulminated against the “wretches” who had “picked up from our streets an unprotected foreign child, and prepared him for the dissecting knife by assassination.” For the anonymous writer of The History of the London Burkers, a sense of national disgrace was invoked: “Can this be England—the most enlightened, the most civilised country of the globe? Alas! that England should now stand indelibly stained by guilt of so foul, so unnatural a blackness.”
Inexpensive broadsheets, plagiarizing the official accounts, meant that the poor could enjoy reading about trials and executions. Some printers were so keen not to spend money that they reused dated stock scenes from past murders.
Poor homeless Fanny Pigburn—kicked out by her landlord; afraid to return to her relations (for reasons unknown), unwilling to inflict herself on any other friend or family member, and so lacking in self-worth that she had dyed a new white bonnet black because she felt a white one was too smart for her to wear—was never sentimentalized. Carlo had been given the role of Daft Jamie (James Wilson), the ei
ghteen-year-old murdered by Burke and Hare, whose sixteen known victims also included Mary Paterson, eighteen, who was so fine looking that her corpse was sketched and painted at Dr. Knox’s school and preserved in spirits.12 But Fanny—pockmarked, skinny, fond of a drink, unmarried mother of two children she could not afford to care for—was not considered worthy of commemoration. Similarly, young Cunningham of Bishop’s confession was dully British, a London street boy, a runaway quite possibly surviving on the fringes of Smithfield’s criminal culture, having none of the Latin glamour of Carlo or the pathos of Daft Jamie. In five years’ time, Charles Dickens would give a character and dialogue to boys like Cunningham, bringing them into focus with the creation of the Artful Dodger and Charley Bates in Oliver Twist, but until then, London urchins appear in writing as a disreputable composite—dirty, dishonest, and barely human. “Your true London boy of the streets [has a] mingled look of cunning and insolence,” wrote journalist Charles Knight; while the author of the 1832 penal-reform volume Old Bailey Experience decided “they have a peculiar look of the eye … and the development of their features is strongly marked with the animal propensities.… They may be known almost by their very gait in the streets from other persons. Some of the boys have an approximation to the face of a monkey, so strikingly are they distinguished by this peculiarity. They form a distinct class of men by themselves.”13
* * *
Meanwhile, trade was as brisk as ever in Nova Scotia Gardens. Broadsheet sellers were crying out their titles and opening lines, and various religious tract societies were cashing in with fire-and-brimstone pamphlets on the wages of sin, with particular reference to the Late Murders. Even during a long downpour, the atmosphere was that of a village fair. The tours of No. 3 were still attracting hundreds of people. An elegantly dressed woman was seen to stoop down and scoop up water from the fatal well in order to taste it, while outside the front of the cottage, a lollipop peddler had set up a stall to sell sugar figurines of three burkers dangling from a miniature sugar gallows (a passerby was heard noting May’s reprieve and suggesting the confectionery be adapted accordingly). The talk of local women was about how Bishop and Williams’s punishment should have been longer and more painful. Inside the house, a self-appointed master of ceremonies was pointing out to visitors the relevant parts of No. 3, using a large stick. “This here was the wery bed wot he and his woman slept on,” he announced in the Bishops’ bedroom, though it is surprising that the bed had survived the first waves of visitors—perhaps a replacement had been installed in order not to disappoint.14
A better-quality representation of Carlo sold as a print after the trial; engraving by J. Thomson after J. Hayes
A contemporary account reveals the more typical entertainment available for high days and holidays in the vicinity during those years, and puts the House of Murder hubbub into perspective. The anonymous essayist who contributed the article “Four Views of London” to the New Monthly Magazine described a Whitsuntide holiday trip he had made to Spitalfields, just south of Bethnal Green, his first visit to the area in thirty years and his chance to note its shocking decline since the collapse of the silk trade. For the poor, a holiday treat was tea in a tea garden, where two pennies was the price of hot water and crockery, but the tea leaves were not supplied. The writer watched as families sat on a blackened lawn, the entertainment consisting of one improvised swing for the children, a tiny, covered skittle ground, and a soaped pole to climb. For spectacle, the publican compelled an ill-looking boy to pick up a hundred pebbles within a set time. The eyewitness noted “an entire absence of all mirth and enjoyment.”15
* * *
In Radical circles, Bishop and Williams were providing material for satirical entertainment. Figaro in London was a scurrilous, antiestablishment weekly newspaper (price one penny) that took its name from the famous French daily and throughout its short life campaigned vigorously for electoral reform. In its Christmas Eve edition, 1831, the details of the Italian Boy case were used to lampoon the bishop of London—Charles Blomfield—and the duke of Wellington, who had been prominent among parliamentarians who had killed off the Reform Bill in October 1831: “I, Bishop, of London, do hereby declare and confess that I took a prominent part in the Burking of the Bill which has caused so great a sensation in the country. My principal accomplice was the person known as the Head of the Tories who endeavoured to cover his notoriously bad character by boasting of being of William’s family. We both got the Bill into our power in a house in the neighbourhood of Westminster, and commenced our operations by plying it with a quantity of half and half, and in a very moderate measure, with which we had intended to stupefy it at once, but it did not take sufficient effect.”16
This Radical, pro-Reform journal, edited by Henry Mayhew, used the Italian Boy trial to lampoon the anti-Reform duke of Wellington and bishop of London, shown wearing a smock frock.
But thrills, pathos, and laughter were not Bishop and Williams’s principal legacy. Twelve days after their execution, Henry Warburton, MP, introduced his second Anatomy Bill to the Commons; by 20 December, it was having its second reading. In 1829, Warburton’s original bill—to make the unclaimed bodies of paupers who died in workhouses and hospitals available to teachers of anatomy for dissection—had been passed by the Commons but thrown out by the Lords. As with the Reform Bill, the upper house rejected attempts to tinker with God’s natural order—the aristocracy had ordained rights and privileges but also had a duty of care toward its inferiors, including their corpses. No upstart doctors should be allowed to interrupt this beautiful, natural, sacred hierarchical design for society.
As with the original bill, the opponents of Warburton’s second attempt at legislation comprised a broad coalition of, on the one hand, Tories who believed the traditional social order was under attack and foresaw the potential for further civil unrest if such a socially divisive act were to be passed and, on the other, Radicals who believed the poor should never become fodder for middle-class self-betterment.
Sir Frederick Trench, Tory member for Cambridge, told the Commons that Warburton’s measure should be renamed “a Bill to Encourage Burking,” claiming that legalizing the supply in no way removed the premium for hastening a relative’s death. All that was needed to prevent another Bishop and Williams was for surgeons to examine far more carefully the Subjects that were offered to them, said Trench.17
Similarly, Cresset Pelham, the member for Shropshire, recognized that Warburton’s bill treated the human body as an item of trade, while merely bringing down the price of such a commodity. “The bill would give a legal encouragement to the traffic in human blood,” said Pelham, who suggested that the best way to put an end to burking would be to inflict stronger punishment on the “receivers.” Alexander Perceval, Tory member for Sligo, also wanted the onus to be placed on the surgeons and said that, in his view, possession of a Subject should be upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony.
The bill’s most vociferous opponent, Henry “Orator” Hunt, capitalized on the unsavory reputation of anatomy schools and spoke of the lack of respect that was shown to corpses by teachers and students, claiming that “the cutting up and mangling of the bodies of human beings was done with as little concern in those human shambles as the bodies of beasts were cut up in Newgate, Smithfield or any other market.” Hunt professed to have it on the best authority that “the conduct of the young students in the dissecting-room was too often perfectly disgusting—too disgusting to be described even in an assembly like that, composed as it was entirely of men.”18 (Surgeon George Guthrie had given the game away when he wrote, in 1829, an open letter in which he urged anatomists to end the pretense that dissected corpses had a decent burial once they were finished with. Since the flesh was removed at a slow rate, he wrote, it could not be stored until the skeleton had been revealed; the flesh simply ended up with all the other refuse produced by the schools.)19
Orator Hunt told the Commons that in the schools of Paris and Dublin, wax mod
els of the human anatomy had proved quite adequate for teaching purposes, while London “required human carcasses to be sold like pigs or sheep.” Henry Warburton’s withering reply was that only “the ingenious foreigner” who made and marketed wax anatomical figures would claim that they were good enough to use to teach medical students.20
No matter how trenchant and perceptive the arguments made by opponents of the bill, references to Bishop and Williams were reiterated by its supporters to induce a sense of panic, a sense that these imitators of Burke and Hare were likely themselves to have spawned imitators.21 The supporters of the bill were also able to argue convincingly, if insincerely in many instances, that it was the poor who had most to benefit from the act: no longer would the impoverished need to fear the body snatcher or the burker. Whig member for Calne, in Wiltshire, Thomas Babington Macaulay, told the Commons on 27 February 1832, “That a man has property, that he has connections, that he is likely to be missed and sought for, are circumstances which secure him against the burker. It is curious to observe the difference between murders of this kind and other murders. An ordinary murderer hides the body and disposes of the property. Bishop and Williams dig holes and bury the property, and expose the body to sale. The more wretched, the more lonely the human being may be, the more desirable prey he is to these wretches. It is the man, the mere naked man, that they pursue.”
The bill was passed by forty-three votes to five in the Commons on 11 May 1832, and two months later the Lords passed the measure, with the bill’s sponsor in the Lords, the Whig-leaning earl of Minto, still harping on one particular rumor concerning Bishop and Williams that had failed to be dispelled, despite months of official denials.