Jacksonville Public Library

The Italian boy, a tale of murder and body snatching in 1830s London, Sarah Wise

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-356) and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

The Italian boy

bibliography

53975523

Sarah Wise

a tale of murder and body snatching in 1830s London

Before his murder in 1831, the "Italian boy" was one of thousands of orphans on the streets of London, moving among the livestock, hawkers, and con men, begging for pennies. When his body was sold to a London medical college, the suppliers were arrested for murder. Their high-profile trial would unveil London's furtive trade in human corpses carried out by body-snatchers -- or "resurrection men" -- who killed to satisfy the first rule of the cadaver market: the fresher the body, the higher the price. Historian Sarah Wise reconstructs not only the boy's murder but the chaos and squalor of London that swallowed the fourteen-year-old vagrant long before his corpse appeared on the slab. In 1831, the city's poor were desperate and the wealthy were petrified, the population swelling so fast that old class borders could not possibly hold. All the while, early humanitarians were pushing legislation to protect the disenfranchised, the courts were establishing norms of punishment and execution, and doctors were pioneering the science of human anatomy

Murder and body snatching in 1830s London