Volume 51, Number 20 · December 16, 2004
Notes from Underground
By Fiona MacCarthy
The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London
by Sarah Wise
Metropolitan, 375 pp., $26.00
On a dank foggy morning in London in December 1831 two men are brought out to be dispatched on the scaffold erected outside Newgate Prison. A crowd of between 30,000 and 40,000 people press forward, risking their own lives, to watch the gruesome culmination of what had become a notorious criminal case. When the bodies are cut down they are handed over ceremoniously to the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection. This is a horribly appropriate denouement. The crime for which the men had been convicted was the murder of a vagrant street boy, discovered when they attempted to sell his dead body to the anatomists for medical research.
Review, 3536 words
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