The Italian Boy (50 page)

7
. George Boulton Mainwaring, a JP at the Worship Street magistrates office, one of the offices that dealt with the East End of London (
Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants
, 1821, p. 61).

8
. Williams Burke and Hare and their wives spent a large portion of the proceeds of murder on ostentatious clothing; their new glamour was noted by neighbors, who did not suspect how they had come into the money.

9
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 128.

10
.
A Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis
(1829), p. 135.

11
. There were others engaged in the trade of London typologizing: Francis Grose published his
Lexicon Balatronicum: A Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket Eloquence
in 1823;
The Strangers Guide: or, Frauds of London Detected
was published in 1808 by George Smeeton, who also wrote
Doings in London
in 1828.

12
. Ann Taylor story from the
Morning Chronicle
, 29 September 1829; Taylor was sentenced by magistrates to three months in the Bridewell prison for attempting to obtain charity under false pretenses. Jane Weston case reported in
Hue and Cry
, 27 January 1826. James Prior case in
Hue and Cry
, 7 February 1827.

13
.
The Cries of London
(1839).

14
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 128.

15
. The alderman’s comment was reported in the
Morning Chronicle
, 6 October 1829; the attraction of the Temple Bar shenanigans is mentioned in
British Police and the Democratic Ideal
by Charles Reith (1943), p. 73.

16
. To what extent the police took advantage of these powers has been discussed by Steven Inwood in his essay “Policing London’s Morals: The Metropolitan Police and Popular Culture, 1829–1850,”
London Journal
15, no. 2 (1990): 129–46. Inwood points out that although the following activities were banned in 1839, accounts from the 1840s and later show that they nevertheless proliferated: causing public obstruction or danger with animals or vehicles; rolling tubs, hoops, and wheels unnecessarily; posting bills; writing on walls; using threatening or abusive words or behavior; using noisy instruments in the process of begging, selling, or entertaining in the street; throwing stones; lighting fires or fireworks; ringing or knocking at doors; putting out lamps; soliciting or loitering; selling indecent pictures; singing indecent songs; using profane language; flying kites; and using a dogcart.

17
. The 1662 Act of Settlement was modified over the course of the eighteenth century and places of settlement could be changed in a number of other ways: paying ten pounds or more in rent in a new parish automatically granted resettlement, as did the payment of local taxes for a specified period, the completion of a year’s service in a parish office, or the fulfillment of an indentured apprenticeship—all of which actions tended to favor those who were either reasonably wealthy or educated or in a fairly secure trade. However, some parishes were “closed,” forbidding any kind of settlement to newcomers in order to keep the poor rates down. James Stephen Taylor’s excellent book
Poverty, Migration and Settlement in the Industrial Revolution
(1989) gives many examples of settlement disputes within the City of London’s St. Martin Vintry ward.

18
. A Select Committee of 1828 claimed that parish poor relief was uncoordinated across the country and that while some people received help without having to perform any parochial tasks, others had to do a great deal of work. The level of financial support given was supposed to reflect the number of people the head of the family maintained. Some parishes refused to give any outdoor relief, insisting that the workhouse was the only option, even for the sick or elderly; the committee estimated that nine out of ten impoverished people were refusing to go into the workhouse—even if that was the only source of aid (
Report of the Select Committee on That Part of the Poor Laws Relating to the Employment or Relief of Able-Bodied Persons from the Poor Rate
, 1828, p. 169).

19
. Richard Burn’s five-volume
Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer
—a manual of legal rules and precedents for JPs, published in various editions beginning in 1818—dedicates one whole volume, volume 4, at 1,286 pages, to the “relief and ordering of the poor,” with advice on settlements and removal orders.

20
. J. Wade,
A Treatise on the Police and Crimes of the Metropolis
(1829), pp. 137–40.
    Wade’s life’s work was to expose in print the idiocies and inequities of a nation ruled by a backward-looking aristocracy. A workingman made good (he had been a woolsorter), he was a Benthamite Radical, whose
Extraordinary Black Book
(1831) was colloquially known as “the Reformer’s Bible,” as it listed the abuses of the undemocratic, unaccountable bodies that controlled British public life.

21
.
Morning Chronicle
, 9 October 1829.

22
. Wade,
Treatise
, p. 6;
The Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey
, pp. 173–74; James Grant,
The Great Metropolis,
vol. 1 (1837), p. 6.

23
. Smith,
Vagabondiana
. The Select Committee that investigated vagrancy in 1821 included evidence from Yorkshire that members of the working class never refused money to a blind beggar and would even borrow in order to be able to give alms; those in receipt of parish relief had also been spotted helping beggars (
Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants
, 1821).

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).