Read Online The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise - Free Book Online

result of scurvy—and his face was bruised. In April 1834 he went to the Dicity and told its officers that he was too frightened to go back to his lodgings in Vine Street, off Saffron Hill, in Little Italy. He said that he had been beaten by the man he worked for, Alexander Ronchatti, because he had failed to bring back enough money from his begging; Ronchatti also “employed” two other boys to go out into the street to beg, said the boy. When questioned through an interpreter, Ronchatti denied the boy’s story, saying that the child had absconded from his lodgings with the doll, which belonged to Ronchatti. The Dicity officer on duty claimed to have witnessed such a scene before, where an Italian running a troupe of beggar boys had used an interpreter to lie and cover up for him. However, Ronchatti was discharged, after being admonished via the interpreter. The boy was given into the care of the Italian ambassador’s staff. Only the doll was arrested—it was impounded by the Dicity, being worth three pounds. 25
    It was a telling incident. By the 1830s, a separate group of vagrant children had emerged, combining the role of entertainer and outcast and catering to that hunger for spectacle that saw people flock to the flimsiest, makeshift, unlicensed theatrical performances (“penny gaffs”) and to horse-drawn caravan shows featuring midgets, bizarre animals, waxworks, and people with unusual deformities—even to gawk at the oranges and pineapples and other exotic fruit when their season arrived at Covent Garden market. 26 To a population with little access to books or periodicals, and no access to parks, zoos, galleries, or museums—forbidden to them by price and by social exclusivity—Italian boys brought music, pathos, intriguing objects, and strange animals, plus, in many cases, their own physical beauty, to some of London’s grimmest streets. The imaginative life of the poor was kept from starvation by such humble food.

    Caravan shows and puppet booths attracted adults as well as children, despite a crackdown on street noise and “nuisance” in London.

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    The economies of the Italian states had been devastated by the Napoleonic Wars; some northern regions experienced famine in 1816 and 1817, while political repression was common in the disputed areas of Piedmont and Savoy, which bordered France. (Savoy would be ceded to France in 1860; Piedmont to Italy.) There was large-scale migration throughout the 1820s, with many Italian artisans moving to northern European cities to pursue their trades. In London, Italians were renowned for their skill in manufacturing optical devices—spectacles, telescopes, barometers—musical instruments, puppets, and waxworks. They introduced to Britain fantoccini, grotesque puppets in elaborate costume; grown men were observed to collapse into giggles at fantoccini performances in booths at street corners. 27 The wax and plaster artists, the figurinai, came mainly from Lucca in Tuscany and settled in Holborn and Covent Garden. While later in the century Italian street children would be known for playing instruments and dancing, until the mid-1830s their principal source of income was exhibiting small animals as well as wax and plaster figures. There was a good trade in silk or paper flowers to which wax birds were attached; busts of literary and theatrical greats, as well as military and naval heroes, would be transported on large trays carried on an image boy’s head, as a walking advertisement for the figurinaio who had created them, while an image boy’s boîtes à curiosité included anatomical wax models, notably a copy of a sketch of recently stillborn Siamese twins who had been dissected by anatomists. Let the rhymester responsible for “The Image Boy,” in the January 1829 issue of the New Monthly Magazine , explain:
Who’er has trudged, on frequent feet,
From Charing Cross to Ludgate Street,
That haunt of noise and wrangle,
Has seen on journeying