by Sarah Wise
24. Quoted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield in Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis (1831), p. 210.
25. Lord Melbourne, 1779–1848 by L. G. Mitchell, p. 127.
26. Weekly Dispatch, 20 November 1831.
Chapter Seven: Neighbors
1. Grant, The Great Metropolis, vol. 1, p. 10; Wade, Treatise, p. 6.
2. Dodd had been appointed to his position in June 1831 at a wage of twenty-five shillings a week; his predecessor had been sacked for sexually assaulting a woman in custody (Public Record Office, Letters from the Public Office, Bow Street, MEPO 1/49 and 1/50).
Chapter Eight: Meat—An Interlude
1. Evidence given to the Select Committee on the State of Smithfield Market, 1828, p. 72; hereafter referred to as 1828 Report on Smithfield Market.
2. An anonymous pamphlet of 1847 entitled Smithfield and the Slaughterhouses.
3. Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 292.
4. Evidence of John Bumpas, local bookseller, 1828 Report on Smithfield Market, p. 72.
5. Ibid., p. 16. Later in the century, Charles Dickens would recount the tale of another victim of Smithfield’s droving practices, whom he discovered while visiting the vast St. Luke’s insane asylum, which stood in Old Street from 1782 to 1966, to the northwest of the present Underground station: “I had been told of a patient in St Luke’s—a woman of great strength and energy, who had been driven mad by an infuriated ox in the streets—an inconvenience not in itself worth mentioning, for which the inhabitants of London are frequently indebted to their inestimable Corporation. She seized the creature literally by the horns, and so, as long as life and limb were in peril, vigorously held him; but the danger over, she lost her senses.” (“A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree,” Household Words, 17 January 1852.)
6. 1828 Report on Smithfield Market, pp. 144–45.
7. Public Record Office, HO 62/8.
8. It is likely that the publication of this pamphlet was timed to coincide with the attempt, in 1823, to pass a parliamentary act banning animal fights and baiting (the measure was defeated in the Commons by 29 votes to 18), and with parliamentary debate on the forthcoming Vagrancy Bill.
9. 1828 Report on Smithfield Market, p. 15; evidence of William Hickson, shoe warehouse owner.
10. Hue and Cry/Police Gazette, 1 October 1825.
11. 1828 Report on Smithfield Market, p. 148; evidence of William Collins, salesman.
12. Times, 25 February 1832. Wives for Sale by S. P. Menefee (1981) explores the British phenomenon of wife selling in detail.
13. Great Expectations, ch. 20 (though written in 1860–61, the novel is set in the 1820s and early 1830s); Oliver Twist, ch. 21 (1837–38).
14. 1828 Report on Smithfield Market contains horrifying eyewitness accounts of slaughter, though many of these are comments on the (even more appalling) conditions in the slaughterhouses of Whitechapel and Shoreditch. Though it is true that many of the accusations were made by reformers keen to provoke change, the substance of their reports was not challenged by any of the slaughtermen or butchers who also gave evidence to the committee.
15. John Hogg, London as It Is (1837); Hogg estimated that around ten thousand cows were kept for milk in London yards and cellars.
16. Evidence on horse slaughter in Smithfield was given to the 1828 Police Select Committee (Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee, p. 186) by one Charles Starbuck, the stockbroker who mistakenly identified an Italian boy to the coroner’s court of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden. Starbuck was a Quaker and involved in a number of reform campaigns—the Friends were renowned for their political lobbying skills. Although he claimed not to be a member of an anticruelty league, Starbuck was most keen to tell the 1828 Police Select Committee that he had himself inspected abattoirs in Cow Cross, Smithfield, and found half-starved horses awaiting slaughter, many of them stolen, in his opinion. It is puzzling that Starbuck was co-opted onto the list of witnesses, since he had no obvious expertise or involvement in the trade; it may be that he enjoyed some kind of personal rapport with whoever convened the witnesses—perhaps using whatever networks Quakers had at their disposal—and thus found a channel for his views.
17. The hospital treated, and learned from, market injuries. Histories of Specimens in the Museum, a logbook compiled by surgeons Edward Stanley and James Paget between 1832 and 1845, describes a typical case of “a drover, 25, brought into the hospital for a wound in the back part of the right leg which had bled profusely. His boot was full of arterial blood and his steps could be traced for some way across the square of the hospital and in Smithfield in large spots of blood. The wound had been inflicted by a large pointed instrument and had passed about two inches deep.” Three days after his admission, delirium tremens set in, and the drover died not long after (Manuscript vol. MU3 in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives, p. 139).
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).
2. King’s and Some King’s Men by H. Willoughby Lyle (1935), p. 7.
3. Lancet, 14 September 1833.
4. The Centenary History of King’s College London by F. J. C. Hearnshaw (1928), p. 22.
5. Lancet, 16 October 1831.
6. Lancet, 29 September 1832.
7. Report of the Select Committee on Medical Education, part 2 (1834), Q6714, p. 203.
8. Sir Astley’s price list is according to Lancet, 3 November 1832.
9. The Brookesian building survived until the early 1920s, having served as offices to a publisher and then an architectural practice. Blenheim Steps is today Ramillies Street, and the school was near the eastern corner with Great Marlborough Street. In his back garden, Brookes had constructed his Vivarium, a grottolike folly built of rock to which were chained live birds and animals, including an eagle, a hawk, an owl, pheasants, foxes, racoons, and a tortoise. The site of the garden is now 1 and 2 Ramillies Street (“Joshua Brookes’s Vivarium” by Tim Knox, in London Gardener; or, The Gardener’s Intelligencer 3 [1997–98]).
10. Joseph Constantin Carpue (1764–1846) was of Spanish descent, born in Brook Green, Hammersmith, and had been a priest, a bookseller, a barrister, and an actor before entering the medical profession; later he became a Liberal member of Parliament. A tall, ungainly, gray-haired man, he always dressed in black with a huge white neckerchief. He was said to be among the best anatomical draftsmen in London but nevertheless was one of a number of anatomists/surgeons ostracized by the medical establishment. A pioneer of plastic surgery, he published his Account of Two Successful Operations for Restoring a Lost Nose from the Integuements of the Forehead (1816). Carpue’s other specialty was galvanism and he was present at the attempt, on 18 January 1803, to pass an electric
al current through the body of the executed George Foster, hanged at Newgate for murdering his wife. Foster opened one eye, wiggled his legs, and clenched his right hand but failed to be revived (The Newgate Calendar, ed. George Theodore Wilkinson, vol. 2 [1962], pp. 80–82).
In 1800, painters Benjamin West, Richard Costway, and Thomas Banks asked Carpue to nail up a just-executed criminal (a murderer called Legg), who was still warm, so that they could take a plaster cast of how the body hung, in order to produce more realistic Crucifixion scenes; a cast of the crucified Legg is in the Royal Academy, London.
Edward William Tuson (1802–65) trained at Carpue’s school and at the age of twenty-two became a surgeon at the Middlesex Hospital—close to the Little Windmill Street School, where he gave private lectures in anatomy. (Little Windmill Street is plain Windmill Street today, running between Tottenham Court Road and Charlotte Street; Tuson’s school was at Nos. 8–10, now demolished.) While still in his twenties, Tuson published his celebrated work Myology, which revealed the various layers of muscles; he was said to have gone through a great many Subjects in his research for Myology.
11. Exeter ’Change, built in Tudor times, was pulled down in 1829; Exeter Street is near the spot today. Joshua Brookes was involved in the notorious Chunee incident in 1826, when an enraged elephant of that name burst out of another menagerie, owned by one Edward Cross, close to that of Brookes’s brother. After Chunee had finally been destroyed by armed troops, and when his corpse had lain stinking in the Strand for days, Brookes publicly dissected the beast and later angrily denied newspaper reports that he had grilled and eaten a slice of Chunee as part of his investigations (Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by Henry Goddard). Chunee had been brought from India in the ship Lady Astell and had worked at Astley’s Theatre in Lambeth; Astley’s sold him to menagerie owner Stephen Polito (sale negotiated by Mr. Norman, the clown); on Polito’s death, Chunee passed to Edward Cross, who succeeded Polito at the menagerie (Manuscript diaries of William Clift, housed in the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons).