From AwardAnnals
| Book: | The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London |
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| Author: | Sarah Wise |
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| Publisher: | Owl Books |
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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. Once dead, his value increased: As a highly prized “Fresh Subject” bound for the anatomist’s or surgeon’s table, he was sold to a medical college by the men who killed him. Their high-profile arrest and trial would unveil London’s furtive trade in human corpses, carried out by body-snatchers—or “resurrection men”—who robbed graves and even murdered to supply the lucrative market for cadavers. After all, a well-preserved body could fetch as much as nine guineas, the yearly salary of a working man.
At once a historical thriller and a social history, The Italian Boy meticulously reconstructs the hour-by-hour activities of the body snatchers, investigates the mysterious identity of the anonymous boy, and traces the labyrinthine twists and turns of a case that would engage society from the wealthy to the most hopeless and helpless. In the process, historian Sarah Wise draws a picture of the chaos and squalor of the city that swallowed the fourteen-year-old vagrant: In 1831, London’s poor were displaced and desperate; the wealthy were terrified, 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.
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