Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #29935 in Books
• Published on: 2005-05-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Christopher Hirst, Independent, 6 May 2005
‘brilliant’

Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph, 7 May 2005
‘excellent...an impressively strong sense of 19th-century poverty seems to ooze from its pages and the details are fascinating’

Andrew Holgate, Sunday Times ‘Pick of the Week’, 8 May 2005
'Colourful without being sensationalist, the result is compelling.'

Customer Reviews

More than a good melodrama, excellent well told history
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 and TV drama where gory murders are cleverly committed and habitually solved (in about 200 pages or 49 minutes plus commercial breaks). It is thematically tedious and 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 and 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 systematically inserts the factual details. Some 500 students required three bodies to dissect during their 16-month training. Not enough criminals were being hanged and 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 and 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 and 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 and as evocative as any Gustave Dore print. Many of the places, bricks and 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 exceptionally 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.

London's Burke and Hare
Sarah Wise has written a well reseached account of the arrest and trial of a gang of London body snatchers who took to providing their own fresh bodies by murdering them. The story of their activities is interspersed with sections on a whole range of subjects relating in particular to the urban poor from which both the killers and their victims came. There is also an insight into the geography of London in the early 1830's and although many of the locations have their modern equivilent the character of them is frequently very different. I would recommend the book to anyone interested in pre-Victorian London, crime and punishment or the New Police.

Top quality history
A well-written history of Regency London low-life.Centering on the gruesome history of the grave-robbers supplying London's medical schools- some of whom found it more convenient to hasten the demise of the subject and not bother with that tiresome disinterment- the author in turn examines aspects of Regency London- drink, the legal system, architecture and public works, cruelty to animals- it's all there in a fascinating history of the London streets that we walk today.