The Italian Boy: A Tale Of Murder And Body Snatching In 1830S London
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the shadowy, fog-choked streets of 1830s London, a young Italian street boy vanished — and the chilling truth of what happened to him would expose the darkest corners of a city simultaneously fascinated and horrified by death. The Italian Boy chronicles the infamous case of the London Burkers, a gang of body snatchers who murdered vulnerable victims to sell their corpses to anatomy schools, unravelling a true crime story that gripped Victorian society and forced a reckoning with the brutal realities of the medical trade. Sarah Wise reconstructs the case with meticulous historical precision, drawing on court records, newspaper accounts, and contemporary sources to paint a vivid portrait of poverty, criminality, and institutional complicity in a city on the edge of reform. Wise's narrative is as much a social history as it is a crime story, illuminating the desperate underclass of Regency London and the morally ambiguous world of surgeons and anatomists who demanded a steady supply of fresh cadavers regardless of their origins. Her prose is authoritative yet compulsively readable, weaving together biography, legal history, and urban geography into a seamless whole. For anyone drawn to the darker undercurrents of nineteenth-century Britain, this account raises a question that lingers long after the final page: in a city that profited from the poor in life, who truly bore responsibility for their deaths?
Author: Sarah Wise
Format: Hardback
Published: 2004, Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Company, New York
Genre: True crime
Condition remarks:
Book: Very good
Jacket: Worn/faded, no tears
Pages: Good
In the shadowy, fog-choked streets of 1830s London, a young Italian street boy vanished — and the chilling truth of what happened to him would expose the darkest corners of a city simultaneously fascinated and horrified by death. The Italian Boy chronicles the infamous case of the London Burkers, a gang of body snatchers who murdered vulnerable victims to sell their corpses to anatomy schools, unravelling a true crime story that gripped Victorian society and forced a reckoning with the brutal realities of the medical trade. Sarah Wise reconstructs the case with meticulous historical precision, drawing on court records, newspaper accounts, and contemporary sources to paint a vivid portrait of poverty, criminality, and institutional complicity in a city on the edge of reform. Wise's narrative is as much a social history as it is a crime story, illuminating the desperate underclass of Regency London and the morally ambiguous world of surgeons and anatomists who demanded a steady supply of fresh cadavers regardless of their origins. Her prose is authoritative yet compulsively readable, weaving together biography, legal history, and urban geography into a seamless whole. For anyone drawn to the darker undercurrents of nineteenth-century Britain, this account raises a question that lingers long after the final page: in a city that profited from the poor in life, who truly bore responsibility for their deaths?