The Italian Boy (49 page)

3
.
Morning Advertiser
, 9 November 1831.

4
. Dickens worked at Warren’s blacking factory at 30 Hungerford Stairs, just off the Strand, near to where Charing Cross station stands today, and then in Chandos Street, when the factory moved premises. The work involved pasting labels onto pots of blacking—used to keep fire grates, stoves, boots, and metalwork freshly black. In Camden his landlady was Mrs. Roylance, “a reduced old lady,” as he later described her, whose house was in Little College Street. (
The Life of Charles Dickens
by John Forster, vol. 1 [1872], pp. 31–38.)

5
. John Wontner’s evidence in the
Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Cause of the Increase in the Number of Commitments and Convictions in London and Middlesex
, 1828, p. 54.

6
.
Times
, 21 March 1826.

7
.
The Sixth Report of the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1824).

8
. The
Morning Chronicle
of 27 September 1829 reported 120 vagrants being repeatedly cleared from a brickyard in Ratcliff, east London, where they were accustomed to spending the night; they included children as young as eleven years old.

9
.
Morning Post
, 29 September 1828.

10
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, appendix D, p. 317. An attempt to assess each child’s educational level is made in this table; Elizabeth Butler could make out a few words but was unable to write; her only schooling had been at a Sunday school in Whitechapel. Most of the children who passed through London’s judicial and penal systems in the 1820s seemed to have acquired at least a small degree of literacy.

11
. The Corn Laws, introduced in 1804, set high import tariffs to prevent foreign corn from coming into the country until British corn had attained a certain price, whereupon the tariff dropped. This protectionism kept bread prices high until the repeal of the laws in 1846. By contrast, “free trade” had ensured the collapse of the English silk industry.

12
. Brenton’s open letter to the bishop of London was published in 1832 in pamphlet form as part of a series of addresses to the great and good entitled
On Population, Agriculture, Poor Laws and Juvenile Vagrancy
. On retiring from the navy, Brenton (1774–1839) founded the Society for the Relief of Shipwrecked Mariners and the Children’s Friend Society and set up the Brenton Juvenile Asylum at East Ham. He was also on the board of management of the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy.

13
. London would not get a unitary authority until 1888—decades after Britain’s other cities—with the creation of the London County Council. Until then, London’s local government was administered by its parish vestries—of medieval origin—and boards for lighting, paving and “works” (construction), and so on.

14
. For example, of 3,035 committals for vagrancy between February 1827 and April 1828, only 73 convictions were properly documented by London magistrates, which meant that almost 3,000 people were being detained in prison with no written proof of their guilt or of the evidence that had been used to convict them (evidence given by Serjeant Pell, a Middlesex magistrate, to the 1828 Police Select Committee,
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 236).

15
.
Morning Post
, 24 November 1831.
    Similarly, police officers are on record as showing kindness to vagrants. In 1831 officers took a sick and homeless man to St. Giles workhouse in order to find him a meal and a bed for the night but were told by the doorkeeper that since it was after nine o’clock at night there could be no new admission, and that they could take the man “to hell.” Instead, the officers formally arrested the beggar to give him shelter in a tiny cell in Covent Garden’s Dyott Street station. In the morning they found him dead. Source:
Lancet
, 13 August 1831.

16
. 5 Geo IV c 83.

17
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 81.

18
. A total of nineteen men were executed for taking part in Swing disturbances.

19
. Conway lived at 52 North Road, close to the Bishop family home (
Report from the Select Committee on the Existing Laws Relating to Vagrants
, 1821, p. 39).

20
.
The Twelfth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1830). One of the Dicity’s founders was William Henry Bodkin, who crops up later in our story as a prosecuting counsel at the Old Bailey. Bodkin had also been chairman of the Houseless Poor Association charity and had a place on the 1828 Police Select Committee.

21
.
The Eleventh Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1829).

22
.
Morning Chronicle
, 22 September 1829. Laing would be satirized by Charles Dickens as the arrogant and vicious magistrate Fang in
Oliver Twist
(ch. 11), while the satirical newspaper
Figaro in London
would claim of Laing “his inhumanity is as proverbial as his ignorance” (24 December 1831).

23
.
The Twelfth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1830).
    The year before, the following people had arrived at Red Lion Square:
        “MS,” 17, a female pilferer, keeps running from home;
        “EB,” 21, a Bristol girl, persistently begs in London;
        “AG,” 30, deserted by husband and has a child, no legal settlement given since she is Irish, though has spent 19 years in London;
        “CF,” 12, a girl sent out to beg by her mother;
        “JR,” 14, a Scot, his father’s vessel sailed and he was abandoned in London, taken in by a woman, sent to the Society and thence to Scotland;
        “TL” and “WL,” two strong, lazy, idle fellows arrested for infesting the Kent Road and given three months in Guildford jail;
        “RG,” borrowed a wife and three children to beg at the office;
        “PC,” 16, “Swiss,” an impostor with a wealthy brother;
        “WM,” queued at the dock gates for fourteen days applying to get shifts;
        “MC,” 29, Irish with four children, found in a doorway in Chancery Lane with three women standing by looking worried, all were fakes, even the children—whatever money is procured by the deception is equally divided, and the night spent most jovially in the purlieus of St. Giles (
The Eleventh Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
[1829]).

24
.
The Twelfth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1830).

25
.
Times
, 2 April 1834.

26
. Young Charles Dickens amused himself by looking at the pineapples during his lunch hour (
The Life of Charles Dickens
by John Forster, vol. 1, p. 36).

27
.
The Cries of London
by J. T. Smith (1839).

28
.
Eighth Report of the London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1826).

29
.
Globe and Traveller
, 12 November 1831.

30
. Two books contain fascinating background on the trade in Italian children:
The Little Slaves of the Harp
by John E. Zucchi (1992) and
Italian Immigrants in 19th-Century Britain: Realities and Images
by Lucio Sponza (1988).

31
. Giuseppe Leonardi, fifteen, died of lung disease—thought to have been brought on by neglect—in St. Giles workhouse in 1845; his padrone, Rabbiotti, was charged with manslaughter but acquitted. In 1861, five-year-old Carminello Ada died in St. Pancras workhouse after having been found suspended by his arms and legs from a ceiling and covered in bite marks (
The Little Slaves of the Harp
).

32
.
Times
, 2 April 1834. I have been unable to find any such petition in the surviving Home Office records in the Public Record Office. Stuart (1803–54) was the grandson of Thomas Coutts, banking tycoon. His cousin was the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts, who in 1837 would inherit the Coutts fortune.

33
. Charles MacFarlane,
Popular Customs, Sports and Recollections of the South of Italy
(1846), p. 135; Charles Knight,
London
, vol. 1 (1841), p. 423.

Chapter Five: Systematic Slaughter

1
.
The Registers of St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden
, ed. the Reverend William H. Hunt, vol. 5:
Burials, 1752–1853
(1909). The entry says, “supposed to be about 14.” Although the graveyard, in Cleveland Street, has been cleared, the workhouse building, dating from 1778, remains as the outpatients’ department of the Middlesex Hospital.

2
.
Globe and Traveller
, 14 November 1831.

3
. Method described in
The Sack ’Em Up Men
by Richard L. Hewer (1928), p. 152.

4
.
The Life of Sir Astley Cooper
by Bransby Cooper (1843), p. 395.

5
. Quotation from
Weekly Dispatch
, 20 November 1831;
Observer
, 20 November 1831.

6
.
Times
, 21 November 1831.

7
.
Morning Advertiser
, 12 November 1831.

Chapter Six: Houseless Wretches Again

1
. Horsey, Johnson, Dancing Doll Man, and Blind Charles Wood feature in J. T. Smith’s
Vagabondiana
(1817). In vol. 1 of journalist Charles Knight’s
London
(1841), Samuel Horsey is also fondly remembered as “half a Hercules” (p. 424).

2
. Tim Buc Too was also known as Brutus Billy; he lived in White Horse Yard, off Stanhope Street, Drury Lane, dying in 1854 at the age of eighty-seven (
Some Account of the Parish of Saint Clement Danes Past and Present
by John Diprose [1868], p. 164). “TL” is mentioned in
The Thirteenth Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity
(1831). Work on Marc Isambard Brunel’s tunnel from Wapping to Rotherhithe started in 1825 but was not to be completed until 1840, by which time ten men had died during construction and the project was over budget. The
Times
dubbed it the Great Bore.

3
.
London
, vol. 1, p. 424.

4
.
Report of the 1828 Police Select Committee
, p. 83.

5
.
Suggestions for the Architectural Improvement of the Western Part of London
by Sydney Smirke (1834).

6
. De Quincey, “The Nation of London” (1834), in
The Selected Writings of Thomas De Quincey
, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (1939), p. 173; Poe, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), in
Selected Tales
, ed. Julian Symons (1980); and John Hogg,
London as It Is
(1837). Hogg diagnosed even the upper-class London male as haggard, glassy-eyed, and emaciated: “Everything is getting later and later, due to the pressure of commerce and business,” he said (p. 342).