"A man has been observed on the streets, soliciting charity, with a bag on his back, from the mouth of which protruded a human head.
"On Friday evening he was taken to the station house by one of the police, who found the bag to contain a young man about 18, crippled in both his legs and arms, whom he carried about to excite compassion.
"On being taken before the magistrates he was ordered to make himself scarce."
Which is all we are told by The Western Times (9th September 1843) of this horror story from mid-Victorian Exeter.
This young man recalled to me the heart-rending, Ozymandias-reciting character, Harrison, played by Harry Melling in the Coen Brothers' Buster Scruggs.
It is amazing how little compassion the Exeter magistrates found for this wandering mendicant and the crippled teenager in his bag whom I suspect they saw as being less than human. The man seeking charity was presumably told to pick up his bag and walk out of town. The magistrates would no doubt have argued that they were only carrying out a prime duty, (neglected now?) to keep undesirable strangers from the streets of Exeter.
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