UBC: Wise, The Italian Boy

The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book is amazing. It sets out to do several things, and it does all of them elegantly and in meticulous detail, which is not a common combination.

The central focus of the book is the trial of John Bishop, Thomas Williams (aka Thomas Head and a whole host of other names), and James May for "burking" a vagrant boy. "Burking," from William Burke, means to murder someone for the value of their corpse, specifically in order to sell them to an anatomy school for use in the teaching of dissection. They boy they murdered and hawked around the London medical schools may or may not have been Carlo Ferrari aka Charles Ferrier, an Italian street vagrant in his early teens. Carlo was one of an unknown number of Italian boys who--proving that Dickens' imagination wasn't as good as modern readers might like to think--were brought to England by padroni (for which read Fagin) and sent out into the streets to beg or play instruments or exhibit animals (Carlo was known to have two white mice he kept in a cage strapped to his chest and/or a tortoise) or pick pockets. All proceeds returned to the padroni; the boys were destitute vagrants. And they were only a subset of the vagrant child and adolescent population of London. Bishop and Williams both claimed the boy they were tried for murdering was a drover's boy they found in Smithfield.

So in recounting the course of the trial, Wise is also examining the resurrection trade in London in the 1820s and '30s, examining adolescent vagrancy, and examining the (almost entirely undocumented) lives of the destitute urban poor. Plus the workings of justice. And she's watching London watch itself, as it tries to figure out how to be a city in the brave new world of the Industrial Revolution. Her endnotes are full of the history of the buildings and streets of London, noting which are still there and which were demolished and when and where they were.

This is a fascinating book, beautifully written and lively and full of sympathy for the desperate lives the urban poor were struggling through. She analyses carefully, pulling back to assess the convicted murderers' stories, the various witnesses' stories, the muddle made of the case's forensics, the hypocrisy, visible also in the case of Burke and Hare, where nobody goes on trial or gets put in jail for buying corpses, even if they've bought a corpse they should clearly have been able to tell had never been buried. (In this way, the resurrection trade is much like prostitution.)

If you're interested in nineteenth century London in any capacity, I highly recommend this book.



View all my reviews