The Italian Boy (48 page)

16
. This was how anatomist Joshua Brookes (1761–1833) described them to the Select Committee (
Report
, p. 82).

17
. “Old Stories Re-Told” in
All The Year Round,
16 March 1867.

18
.
Weekly Dispatch
, 27 November 1831.

19
. The Bishops lived near the Red Lion inn, which was at 90 North Hill (demolished in 1900), and the Wrestlers inn, which dates back to 1547 and today still holds the medieval Swearing on the Horns of Highgate drinking ritual. John Bishop the younger’s pub of choice, the Green Dragon (which dated back to at least 1730), was at 10 North Road, the southern end of North Hill; it was demolished in 1898 and Highgate School is now on the site.

20
. Their marriage license is in the St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, marriage registers at Guildhall Library and it reveals that Sarah was illiterate, as she signed with an X. St. Leonard’s, by architect George Dance the Elder (1695–1768), was completed in 1740 and still stands, at the busy junction of Shoreditch High Street, Old Street, Kingsland Road, and Hackney Road.

21
.
Morning Advertiser
, 25 November 1831.

22
. London Metropolitan Archives, Clerkenwell New Prison Committals Lists, MJ/CC/V/003.

23
.
Revelations of Prison Life
, pp. 28–30. Coldbath Fields, rebuilt in 1794, stood on the site of today’s Royal Mail depot at Mount Pleasant.

24
. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, First Session, 1827, p. 31.

25
.
Times
, 2 April 1831;
Morning Herald
, 2 April 1831.

26
. The
Globe and Traveller
of 5 December 1831 described the ground beneath the Gardens as “former waste—slag and rubbish,” which would indicate that it had once been a brickyard.

27
.
The Victoria History of the Counties of England: A History of the County of Middlesex
. Vol. II:
Early Stepney with Bethnal Green
(1998), p. 114.

28
. Figures given in the pamphlet
Evidence of the Reverend William Stone
(1833).

29
. “Four Views of London,” an anonymous essay in the June 1833 issue of the
New Monthly Magazine
.

30
.
Morning Advertiser
, 7 November and 12 November 1831.

31
. The Heads’ baptisms and burials took place at St. Leonard’s Church, Bridgnorth; the registers are held in the Shropshire Records and Research Centre in Shrewsbury, at P40/68 to P40/71 (1803–08). In a number of accounts, including those published by the Crown and by the
Times
, his names are used interchangeably, and James Williams and James Head are also thrown into the mix.

32
. As the anonymous writer of the penal-reform book
Old Bailey Experience
(James Harmer?) put it: “No man goes into Newgate twice with the same name, trade, or place of nativity” (p. 112).

33
. Old Bailey Sessions Papers, Fourth Session, 1827, p. 323. Pontifex’s had been in business since 1780 and by 1831 stretched almost halfway down Shoe Lane on the east side; its main building survived until 1894 (
The Parish of St Andrew Holborn
by Caroline M. Barron [1979], pp. 107–08).

34
. Public Record Office, The Newgate List, 1826–28, PCOM 2/199.

35
. The riots are referred to in Michael Ignatieff’s
A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850
(1978), p. 172.

36
.
Weekly Dispatch
, 11 December 1831. If found guilty, Williams would have faced a fine of a hundred pounds.

37
. St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, marriage register at Guildhall Library; Rhoda was illiterate and signed with an X. Thomas Head, “bachelor of this parish,” could read and write. The records of St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, also show that one Mary Ann Bishop died aged five months in the workhouse on 2 March 1828; it is possible she was a daughter of John and Sarah.

38
. Dorset Street was a short road running east-west, just north of Rockingham Street. Today, the Rockingham Estate, postwar London County Council flats, covers the site, approximately where Rennie House stands.

39
. Clare Market opened in 1657. Until 1900, it stood where the northeastern section of Aldwych is today. Both New Inn and Clare Market disappeared during the construction of Aldwych and Kingsway, though a small section of street bearing the name Clare Market remains.

40
. Figures given by journalist Charles Knight in his
London
, vol. 1 (1841), p. 164, a collection of essays on the capital previously published as newspaper columns.

Chapter Three: The Thickest Part

1
.
Oliver Twist
, ch. 54.

2
. Public Record Office, Bow Street Magistrates Outgoing Correspondence, MEPO 1/49 and 1/50.

3
. Public Record Office, Home Office Letters, HO 59/2.

4
. King also called it “Thursday the 4th”—Thursday was in fact the third; the
Morning Advertiser
quotes her as giving the time as “between ten and eleven o’clock” in the morning.

5
. Report of the hearing in the
Times
, 22 November 1831.

6
. Public Record Office, Petitions and Pardons 1830–31, HO 64/2.

7
. Public Record Office, Home Office Domestic Letter Book, vol. 67, letter dated 15 November 1831, HO 43/41.

8
. Middle Row stood at the bottom of Gray’s Inn Road in front of Staple Inn and comprised a small cluster of Tudor buildings forming an island in the middle of High Holborn. It was pulled down in 1866 to widen the road.

9
.
Times
, 19 November 1831.

10
.
Globe and Traveller
, 12 November 1831.

11
. The outer walls and basement cells of the Clerkenwell New Prison (also called the Clerkenwell House of Detention) still stand, at Clerkenwell Close.

12
. Exchange reported in the
Sun
, 14 November 1831.

13
. “A Detective Police Party,”
Household Words
, 27 July 1850; reprinted in
Dickens’ Journalism: The Amusements of the People
, ed. Michael Slater (1996), vol. II of the Dent Uniform Edition of Dickens’s Journalism. In
Oliver Twist
, Dickens had shown his contempt for the Runners’ acumen by naming the two Runners called on to investigate a burglary Blathers and Duff.

14
. In a stimulating essay, historian Ruth Paley disputes the stereotype of the Charley, claiming that he was no older, more decrepit, or badly paid than most New Police officers in the early years of the Metropolitan Police (“An Imperfect, Inadequate and Wretched System? Policing London Before Peel,”
Criminal Justice History
10 [1989]: 95–130). Certainly, a look through papers in the Public Record Office (at MEPO 1/44) shows a high turnover of recruits in the early years of the Met, with dismissals given largely on grounds of lack of physical fitness, absenteeism, and drunkenness. The first Metropolitan Police officer to be sworn in, PC William Atkinson, was sacked within an hour for drunkenness, as was the second, PC William Alcock. Some 1,790 of the first 2,800 men enlisted were sacked for being drunk on duty.

15
.
Morning Chronicle
, 26 September 1828.

16
.
Times
, 31 March 1832.

17
. Papers at the Public Record Office (at MEPO 1/44) include what amounts to an apology from Commissioner Rowan to the editor of the
Times
for the number of reprimands and dismissals of Metropolitan Police officers, dated 11 November 1830; while on 16 December 1830 the chief clerk of Bow Street wrote to the editors of the
Times
, the
Morning Chronicle
, and the
Morning Herald
to deny reports that there were plans to enlarge the force.

18
.
Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner
by Henry Goddard; written in 1856 but not published until 1956.

19
. The most recent literary sensation before Vidocq’s
Mémoires
—similarly reaching all classes of Londoner—had been Pierce Egan’s
Life in London
books, published (and much plagiarized) between 1821 and 1828. The appeal of Egan’s comic series lay in its evocation of high life and low life, with its heroes crossing social boundaries in a way that real Londoners could not.

20
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 73.

21
. Ibid., p. 76.

22
. Ibid., p. 80. The Marquis of Anglesey is still there; the Brown Bear is no more.

23
.
Report from the Select Committee on Allegations Relative to the Conduct of Certain Magistrates in the Holborn Division of Middlesex in Granting Licences for Victual Houses
, 1833, p. 261.

24
. Public Record Office, Letter from Richard Mayne, 19 May 1830, MEPO 1/44 3.

25
. Among Minshull’s judgments to cause merriment and alarm in equal measure was his decision in December 1831 to jail four boys—itinerant peddlers of broadsheets—for selling prints of a picture of a child playing with a kitten that was dressed in a petticoat; Minshull took it into his head that this picture was somehow indecent, and, according to the
Sun
of 26 December 1831, his aim “was to stop the circulation of such an infamous publication.” The article goes on to sneer that if Minshull was right, the reporter would never let his grandmother visit the British Museum again, in case any of the antiquities should inflame her passions.

26
.
The First Detectives
by Belton Cobb (1957), p. 59.

27
.
British Police and the Democratic Ideal
by Charles Reith (1943), pp. 90–93.

28
. The Place Papers, British Museum Add Mss 27,789, vol. 1, ff184–86.

29
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 81.

Chapter Four: Houseless Wretches

1
.
Lord Melbourne
by L. G. Mitchell (1997), p. 152. William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne (1779–1848), became home secretary in November 1830 in the Whig government led by Earl Grey; his undersecretary was his brother, George.

2
. Public Record Office, Petitions and Pardons 1830–31, HO 64/2.