Customer Reviews
More than a good melodrama, excellent well told history - By: Stewart Murray McRorie, 13 Jun 2008 
This is my second reading of Sara Wise's excellent book. For several years, it has been a standard stocking filler present for my friends. Curiously, I am strongly adverse to the endless, voyeuristic, procession of books, movies & TV drama where gory murders are cleverly committed & habituallly solved (in about 200 pages or 49 minutes plus commercial breaks). It is thematicallly tedious & depressing in equal measure. The Italian Boy is very much more than a good "who dunnit" although it reads like one. The cliché is correct, fact - well told - is stranger than fiction & much more interesting.
The book is rooted in the slums of 1830s London, where body snatchers decided it was worth murdering to meet the needs of medical science. Wise systematicallly inserts the factual details. Some 500 students required three bodies to dissect during their 16-month training. Not enough criminals were being hanged & donors were inadequate. Stealing freshly buried bodies was risky; even then, not enough to meet supply. At a guinea a corpse, the business was very lucrative. It occurred to some that many wretched people would not be missed. This is a very well structured book, not merely as a commentary on the poor in London but as a detailed insight into police methods, forensic science & the legal process. You sense what Newgate prison was like. Then there is the evolution of medical training, these surgeons did not have clean ethical hands. We are reminded of what is possibly better forgotten. This was a brutal world, arguably better to have been a slave picking cotton than an unskilled labourer in what was then the largest & richest city in the world. This book is not a lecture; it is an easily followed insight showing why much of Victorian London was a hellish place.
While reading the book I bought the relevant Victorian Ordinance survey maps of London. It complemented the text; these maps are absorbing & as evocative as any Gustave Dore print. Many of the places, bricks & mortar, still stand. This book is a primer for further reading. Where Dickens presented colourful characters, Wise has the gagging odours of the Smithfield meat market coming to life. In passing the book also provides a good economic insight; the commercial life of London is well entrenched in the account.
What Wise has achieved is to produce an exceptionallly good story based on detailed historical research. You could not have made it up, it would have read as a tawdry Victorian melodrama. It stands as a serious commentary on Victorian London. So many academics (and their publishers) - who seem to define the quality of their work by the size of their footnotes - should realise intellectual credibility is not risked by writing such competent narrative history.
A must read for all those interested in grave robbers - By: A. M. Quinn, 14 Apr 2007 What makes this book marvelous is not just the excellent research about the subject matter - which, lets face it, is not one that many people are instinctively drawn to - but the fascinating asides & background detail that gives a truely fascinating insight into the lives of the inner city poor in 1830's London. It is always difficult for one to relate the value of money but juxtaposing taxi fares, price of meat, pints of gin (2d)wages of skilled artisans like carpenters & silk weavers with dead bodies (8-12 guineas although with peaks of around 20 guineas)one gets a picture of why these people did what they did.
The background detail of the new police & their rivalry with the Bow Street Runners; the limited aspirations for the police i.e. not expected to investigate crime or to mix with criminals in order to glean information was alll new to me at least.
Similarly, the limitations of jurisprudence were surprising: how limited was the ability of defense lawyers to defend their clients they couldn't speak to the jury; there was no pre-trial disclosure of prosecution evidence; the accused could not take the stand - it was therefore perhaps not surprising that an average high court trial lasted 8 1/2 minutes probably with a very high rates of guilty verdicts - one wonders why the world was taught to look up to British justice, just how bad was it elsewhere? It seems strange that such a distasteful crime as grave robbing was only a misdemeanor whilst relatively low value thefts could be sanction by transportation for life or hanging - Sarah Wise explains that the general premise was based upon ownership (and its loss) - therefore begging the question of who owns a dead body & who has incurred a loss?
The chapter about Smithfields & the animal meat market was equallly (and curiously) fascinating - one rarely considers how the food industry worked in those days especiallly with the dramatic rise in urbanisation that was going on - walking cows from the highlands of Scotland to the London markets - the treatment of animals which were slowly becoming protected whilst humans had perhaps less legal protection.
The demise of grave robbing & 'Burking' as an attractive career choice for criminals came not from raising the penalty nor by criminalising the doctors who created the demand pull (they were gentlemean after alll) but by freeing up the supply side - the unclaimed bodies of the workhouse poor were made available (despite fears that the doctors might still try to encourage the flow when they needed more bodies) & the rise of pestulence & plague that meant that there were many more bodies available.
This is a very stimulating book that I would heartedly recommend
Real Historical event reconstructed, London 1831 - The Story of the Italian Boy - By: Andrea Bowhill, 20 Aug 2006 
The Italian boy was one of a thousand of orphans living on the London streets in 1831, amongst the poor in company of con artist, beggars & prostitutes. The Italian boy case would be remembered because a boy's dead body was sold to a London medical college & the suppliers of the body were caught & arrested for murder. When this high profile court case took place it was unravelled there was a London trade in human corpses. These men hid behind the complete chaos of a growing city. Choosing their prey amongst low lives whose bodies would never be missed. These Murderous thieves two in particular John Bishop & Thomas Williams were known to the City of London as the Body Snatchers (The London Burkers) a third was arrested soon after James May, they killed to satisfy their market demand. All three was charged with the murder of Carlo Ferrari. Words spoken in court at the Old Bailey, "The fresher the body the higher the price". Demand was coming from Doctors looking to make a break through in science of the human anatomy fresh dissection was needed.
Sarah Wise the author has weaved a story with historical events using the Investigation into the case of the London Burkers following the trail itself of 1831. Reconstructing the story in her own words looking at the lives of lower-class Londoners, with a vivid description of London with alll its sight's & smells bringing life to a city & the characters who were corpse trafficking. Ms Wise follows through the trail, which ended with the controversial legislation (Anatomy Bill passed in 1832) which marked the beginning of the end to body-snatching in Britain. Sarah Wise is an historian of Victorian England. This book had me gripped in its pages with fantastic history, descriptions can be gruesome but alll woven into a great piece of storytelling.
The Italian Boy - By: Mrs Cynthia Jolly, 02 Feb 2006 What an excellent book. Thoughly researched with an indepth look at the social history of the time. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested not only in resurrectionists but how ordinary people coped with life at a turbulent time in history.
Gripping! - By: lilysmum, 30 Mar 2005 I was gripped by this page turner of a book about murder & grave robbery in London. If you are interested in reading about crime & murder you will love this book.
