The Italian Boy Read Free

day had turned into a chilly evening by the time the medical men had made up their mind about the cause of death. As Beaman and his colleagues left, two young trainees, by now feeling faint with tiredness and nausea, stayed in the cold, stuffy room to sew up the corpse. Working alongside Beaman had been Herbert Mayo and Richard Partridge, respectively professor and “demonstrator,” or lecturer, of anatomy at King’s College, just a few streets away in the Strand. The day before, Partridge had sent for the police when one of the body-snatching gangs that supplied disinterred corpses to medical schools had tipped this body out of a sack and onto the stone floor of the dissecting room at King’s. It had looked suspiciously fresh. Partridge tricked the body snatchers into waiting at King’s while police officers were summoned, and at three o’clock in the afternoon, John Bishop, James May, and Thomas Williams were arrested on suspicion of murder, along with Michael Shields, a porter who had carried the body.
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    Earlier that day, worried parents of missing sons had been admitted to the watch house to view the body, having read a description of the boy circulated in police handbills and notices posted on walls, doors, and windows throughout the parish. Among the visitors had been several Italians. Signor Francis Bernasconi of Great Russell Street, Covent Garden, “plasterer to His Majesty,” had wondered whether the deceased was a boy from Genoa who had made his living as an “image boy”—hawking wax or plaster busts of the great and the good, past and present, about the streets of London. Bernasconi was a plaster figurine maker, or figurinaio, and he employed a number of Italian child immigrants to advertise and sell his wares in this way. Another figurinaio said that the dead boy had sometimes helped paint the plaster figures and that his “master” had left England at the end of September. The minister at the Italian Chapel in Oxenden Street, off the Haymarket, claimed that the boy had been a member of his congregation but was unable to name him. Two more Italians identified the dead boy as an Italian beggar who walked the streets carrying a tortoise that he exhibited in the hope of receiving a few pennies, while Joseph and Mary Paragalli of Parker Street, Covent Garden, said the boy was an Italian who wandered the West End exhibiting white mice in a cage suspended around his neck. (Joseph was a street musician, playing barrel organ and panpipes.) The Paragallis had known the child for about a year, they said, but neither of them suggested a name for him. Mary Paragalli claimed she had last seen him alive shortly after noon on Tuesday, 1 November, in Oxford Street, near Hanover Square.
    Charles Starbuck, a stockbroker, came forward to tell the Bow Street police officers that he believed the boy was an Italian beggar who was often to be seen near the Bank of England exhibiting white mice in a cage; Starbuck had viewed the body and was in “no doubt” about its being the same child. He had seen the boy looking tired and ill, sitting with his head sunk almost to his lap, on the evening of Thursday, 3 November, between half past six and eight o’clock. Starbuck was walking with his brother near the Bank and said, “I think he is unwell,” but his brother replied, “I think he’s a humbug. I’ve often seen him in that position.” A crowd gathered round, concerned at the boy’s condition, and one youth told the boy he ought to move on as police officers were heading that way. The Starbucks walked on. But on Wednesday the ninth, three days after viewing the body, Charles Starbuck wrote to the coroner to say that he had subsequently seen this boy near the Bank, and retracted his identification.
    The newspapers seized on the possible Italian connection remarkably swiftly. As the coroner’s hearing began on 8 November, the Times referred to the proceedings as “The Inquest on the Italian Boy,”