The Italian Boy by Sarah Wise Page A

called off the rally late in the day, their obedience confounding those who painted them as irrational, bloodthirsty Jacobins.
    Meanwhile, in the countryside, protest against the enclosure of farmland, against low wages, unemployment, and the corruption of many rural parochial authorities—in particular, those who administered relief for the poor—gave rise to widespread civil unrest. The Captain Swing riots—fourteen hundred incidents of arson, livestock-maiming, and damage to farm property—lasted throughout the summer and autumn of 1831, spreading across the whole of southern England, from Kent to Cornwall. 18
    However, the lower classes contained elements within their own ranks that proved the most effective means of quashing unrest and maintaining the status quo. Before the 1824 Vagrancy Act, anyone—including a parish constable—apprehending a beggar had been entitled to a financial reward. One of the most despised figures was the local “vagrant collector,” such as John Conway of Highgate, who turned to the trade when his stay-making business collapsed. Conway was a prolific professional vagrant collector, receiving ten shillings from the parish upon the conviction of every beggar he apprehended and delivered to the magistrates. 19 The new act abolished these rewards—though many people were to remain unaware of this change in the law—but introduced fines of up to five pounds for any parish constable who failed to arrest a beggar. The belief that an apprehender of beggars was paid for turning in vagrants meant that there were plenty of dangers in undertaking such an arrest. The London Society for the Suppression of Mendicity employed a number of plainclothes officers, recruited from the lower-middle classes, to go into the streets to arrest suspected vagrants and bring them to the society’s offices, at 13 Red Lion Square, Holborn. (Residents of the square protested at the “numerous and tumultuous assemblage” that gathered outside the Dicity upon the sudden arrival of the very cold winter of 1830–31.) 20 Once there, the vagrant would be either handed over to the authorities (to magistrates for trial on vagrancy charges or to the appropriate parish for relief) or supplied with vouchers for cheese, potatoes, rice, bread, and soup—or, for a skilled worker, a loan with which to buy the tools of his trade. If a vagrant proved up to stone breaking or oakum picking when put to the test in the Dicity’s yard, he or she could be admitted to its very own poorhouse, whence around one in seven absconded. To qualify for relief, the claimant had to give a full account of his or her life—in effect, had to agree to be surveyed. This type of punitive snooping activity was loathed by the London poor, and Dicity officers were often attacked as they attempted to make arrests. One day in 1829, several hundred bystanders took the side of “MD,” a forty-two-year-old Irish woman who had traveled almost two hundred miles to London from Macclesfield with her four children, all of whom were visibly feverish. The Dicity had given her financial aid in the past and its officers attempted to arrest her when they spotted her begging once more, but they were prevented from taking her into custody by the crowd that gathered round. 21 (Even authority figures faced such hostility: one evening in 1829 a number of police officers attempted to rescue a senior London magistrate, Allan Laing, who had had to barricade himself inside a shop in Lambs Conduit Street, Holborn, when a crowd attacked him for attempting to make a citizen’s arrest on an itinerant match seller who had asked him “for a penny or two.” “Bonnet [punch] him! Bring him out!” shouted the crowd, after they had freed the beggar from Laing’s clutches, to loud cheers. 22 )
    The Dicity produced annual reports praising its deeds of the past year and providing a statistical breakdown and anecdotal evidence of the “Objects” it had processed. Thus, the 1830