The Italian Boy Read Free Page A

when no such identity had been confirmed. In fact, the Times reporter seems to have been quite carried away with emotion by the death of “the poor little fellow who used to go about the streets hugging a live tortoise, and soliciting, with a smiling countenance, in broken English and Italian, a few coppers for the use of himself and his dumb friend.” The report continued: “We saw the body last night, and were struck with its fine healthy appearance.… The countenance of the boy does not exhibit the least contortion, but, on the contrary, wears the repose of sleep, and the same open and good-humoured expression which marked the features in life is still discernible.” 1 This was a fantastical statement, since only someone able to give a positive identification could possibly know how the child had looked when alive. The following day, the Times thundered, in an extraordinary editorial: “If it shall be proved that he was murdered, for the purpose of deriving a horrible livelihood from the disposal of his body—if wretches have picked up from our streets an unprotected foreign child, and prepared him for the dissecting knife by assassination—if they have prowled about in order to obtain Subjects for a dissecting-room—then we may be assured that this is not a solitary crime of its kind.”

    An Italian boy, or image boy, from J. T. Smith’s Etchings of Remarkable Beggars, 1815
    In such a way, rumor was being reported as fact—a matter that was not lost on the coroner’s jury. “We are proceeding in the dark,” complained a member of the jury. The hearing was under way at the Unicorn, a public house in Covent Garden that backed onto St. Paul’s watch house. It appeared to the jury that no one in authority was able to rebut or confirm the various speculations about the identity of the dead boy. How, the jury asked, can we be expected to arrive at a verdict when we don’t even know who has died? And to make matters worse, as soon as any goings-on at hospitals were mentioned or any surgeon looked likely to be named, the coroner and the parish clerk of St. Paul’s would go into a huddle to discuss whether the inquest should continue or be adjourned.
    The jury’s exasperation compelled vestry clerk James Corder, who was overseeing the proceedings, to state that he understood “from inquiries he had made” that the dead boy was called Giacomo Montero, a beggar who had been brought to London a year earlier by an Italian named Pietro Massa, who lived in Liquorpond Street, in the area of Holborn known colloquially as Little Italy. 2 But here Joseph Paragalli spoke up to say that he himself had made his own inquiries at the Home Office’s “Alien Office,” near Whitehall, and that the description held there of Montero did not fit the dead boy in the least. Perhaps then, said Corder, the boy had been Giovanni Balavezzolo, another Italian vagrant boy who was said to be missing from his usual haunts. To solve the problem, Corder suggested the jury simply return a verdict of willful murder against some person or persons unknown. The jury remained unconvinced.

    The Watch House, Covent Garden, circa 1830; St. Paul’s Church is to the right in the picture, the Unicorn tavern to the left, and an Italian boy can be seen just to the right of the arch.
    It was only at this awkward point for Corder that the prisoners were summoned from their underground cells in the St. Paul’s, Covent Garden watch house (the building was at that time being used as a temporary jail/police office; it was originally built as a place of surveillance, from which the graveyard could be guarded against snatchers and other trespassers) to give their account of how they had come into possession of the boy’s body. They entered the crowded room at the Unicorn to be viewed by a fascinated public; the memory of the crimes committed by William Burke and William Hare in Edinburgh just three years earlier was fresh. Had similar events been occurring