Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century

by PHILIP RAWLINGS

  THE CRIMINAL BIOGRAPHY AS HISTORY

  Historians, too, have found the biographies difficult to come to terms with. While many feel comfortable—often too comfortable—with the tracts produced about crime and criminals by official inquiries and social reformers,54 they have been less certain about using biographies. A lot of historians take as their starting point the need to sift out sources which are true/fact from those which are false/fiction, and adopting the categorization of criminal biographies as fiction, they therefore reject them. Even if it is accepted that a distinction needs to be made between fact and fiction (and the reasons for this are by no means obvious), this approach assumes what cannot be assumed, namely, that there is a standard by which fact and fiction can be separated which is both objective and immutable, that what is true today was true in the eighteenth century and, conversely, what is false now was false then. The problems with this are clear: the medieval belief that the earth was flat was as true then as our belief that it is round is today.

  The rejection of the biographies as an historical source is only one approach that has been taken. Other historians adopt the opposite view by regarding them as providing an accurate reflection of reality. There are two reasons why they take such a view. First, the apparent lack of materials seems to leave them with little choice other than to put their faith in published biographies. Yet, Howson’s excellent book on Jonathan Wild, Thief-taker General (1970),55 shows just how much material is available to the hardworking historian and how it can be used to good effect. Second, there is the belief that the criminal biographies are accurate because they ‘feel right’. Salgado summed up this attitude when he wrote about Tudor crime literature, ‘What is certain is that they present, in scenes of unmatched vividness and colour, the seamy side of life in Elizabeth’s London.’56 The biographies ‘feel right’ because of the detail which they contain. The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard (reprinted in this book, p. 47), which is not untypical, mentions 10 dates, refers to more than 45 streets and other places, and names or in some other way identifies over 60 people, giving the occupations of about 30 of these. And that biography is a mere nothing in its detail when compared with the extraordinary The Discoveries of John Poulter. Yet in both there are many obvious omissions: for instance, Poulter’s biography has nothing on his life before 1749, so that the reader might be led to believe that his criminal career only began then, whereas he had been sentenced to transportation in 1746.57

  The inclusion of detail does not mean that the story these biographies tell is an accurate reflection of reality. Indeed, the idea that any piece of writing can be this is curious because it amounts to an assertion that writers are able to take in everything and express it all on paper. It assumes that writing is a non-interventionist act, whereas what writers try to do is to produce what both they and, in their view, the potential readers will see as a coherent narrative. This involves the selection, ordering and interpretation of a vast range of available materials. No two writers will describe the same situation in the same way: as Defoe observed, ‘nothing is more common, than to have two Men tell the same Story quite differing one from another, yet both of them Eye-witnesses to the Fact related’.58 The philosopher, Karl Popper, compared the human mind—and the writer’s mind is, I suppose, no different —with a searchlight which illuminates only certain things. Similarly, the art critic, Ernst Gombrich, has written:

  We can focus on something in our field of vision, but never on everything…. The number of stimuli that impinge upon us at every moment—if they were countable—would be astronomical. To see at all, we must isolate and select…59

  Even if a writer attempts to describe something, the description will never be the thing itself: a description of a tree is not a tree.

  Not far distant from those who believe that criminal biographies present reflections of reality are the social historians whose interest is, primarily, in the labouring poor and for the study of whom these biographies represent a rare source.60 Wary of the problem of accepting the biographies at face value and yet unwilling to reject them totally, they have subjected them to testing against other sources, typically manuscript court records. Without question the resulting work is of great value and has provided a fresh view of the literature. However, the problems of using the literature have not been fully addressed. The verification process is open to obvious criticisms, placing, as it does, such faith in the sources which are used as verifiers. Moreover, the historian’s need to employ this process before feeling able to use the literature as an historical source reinforces the traditional view that the act of distinguishing between absolutes of fact and fiction is not merely possible, but is fundamental to historiography.

  Another approach to this literature has been to accept that the distinction between fact and fiction is of importance and that the biographies are fiction, but then to regard this fictional quality as giving them their value as an historical source. According to this view, while contemporary ‘factual’ writing on real people and events may describe external facts, it is fiction which provides the ‘attitudes’ or ‘inner truth’ of a society or a section of a society. So, it has been argued that crime literature is ‘useful in its own right as a source of information about attitudes to crime’.61 This is similar to the view—and, consequently, faces the same criticisms—that the biographies reproduce reality, the only difference being that here it is claimed that what is being reproduced is an attitude. Even leaving this aside, difficulties are met when the obvious question is asked, whose attitudes are revealed? For some writers popular literature gives a direct insight into the minds of the labouring poor;62 for others the criminal biographies were a literature of resistance, ‘a form of social protest that expressed the class resentment of many who read novels and attended executions’.63 However, there are those who claim the reverse, that the biographies—and, indeed, all forms of popular literature—were simply a means of disseminating ruling-class propaganda amongst the subordinate classes. So, the historian, James Sharpe, has argued that crime literature ‘constituted an important point of contact between official ideas on law and order and the culture of the masses’; elsewhere he has added that ‘the objectives of this literature might include a desire to titilate or shock, but its underlying purpose is to reinforce the values of “straight” society.’64

  The view that popular literature was part of the culture of the people—that is, a culture created by the labouring classes, and, as such, commonly in opposition to a separate culture of the ruling class—assumes, without providing any evidence, not only that there was such a separation in cultures, but also that the labouring people were the main readers of the biographies and had control both of the printing presses and of the means of distribution. On the other hand, the approach that argues that popular literature was pure propaganda fails to answer three questions: why it was that the literature was popular; why it took this form rather than, say, a simple list of ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s; and what effect the transformation of propaganda into crime literature had. No account is taken of the readers—they are represented as mere receptacles ready for anything the ruling class may want to throw into them. Research suggests that readers may interpret texts in ways which had never occurred to the writer.65 So, the writer and the publisher may think they are producing a text which condemns criminals, but the reader may see the criminal as a hero or heroine.

  It seems not unlikely that the popularity of the literature was connected to its form: people liked reading criminal biographies, so publishers kept producing them. Even if the literature was being used as a means of propaganda by the ruling class, the need to put it into a particular form which connected with those which potential readers recognized and enjoyed must have had an effect on any message which it was intended to transmit. More generally, the disagreement as to whether the literature represents the culture of the people or culture for the people, that is, whether it takes an anti-ruling class or pro-ruling class s
tance, shows that identifying it with one class or one set of values is, to say the least, not easy. Curiously, it is the realization that the texts may be shot through with contradictions which provides a way out of the difficulties with them. The key is in the work of Antonio Gramsci.66

  An important concept in Gramsci’s thought is the notion of hegemony. A hegemonic class is one which not only controls the means of economic production, but also has moral and intellectual leadership over subordinate classes. Although such a class does retain control over the means of force—the army, the police and so forth—the use of such large-scale coercion is the exception rather than the norm, and only comes to the fore in times of crisis. Normally, coercion is unnecessary because, Gramsci argues, the subordinate classes subscribe to a view of the world in which only the present ruling class has the right and ability to govern, and, therefore, they do not seek to challenge that right. Although there is continuous use of coercion to suppress, stigmatize and marginalize certain social groups, this further ensures the consent of the bulk of the subordinate classes by providing them with an ‘enemy within’ to fear, to oppose and to make their own position appear favoured. So, Gramsci rejected the Marxist view that a ruling class imposes its own values and beliefs—its own culture—on, and to the exclusion of, that of the subordinate classes. Consent cannot be gained by such a strategy; instead the ruling class seeks to adapt the culture of the subordinate classes so that, while maintaining an apparent continuity with its old forms and practices, it is shifted so as to conform to a view of the world in which the society as presently ordered, both politically and economically, is seen as moral, natural and rational, and it dismisses alternative views as immoral, unnatural and irrational. Inevitably, the cost to the ruling class of obtaining this consent is that its own values are not being imposed in a pure form, but are themselves reshaped by the need to accommodate those of the subordinate classes. However, the amount of this reshaping is limited, so that the fundamental economic basis from which the ruling class, in the last instance, derives its power is maintained. Gramsci wrote:

  Undoubtedly the fact of hegemony presupposes that account be taken of the interests and the tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised, and that a certain compromise equilibrium should be formed…. But there is also no doubt that such sacrifices and such a compromise cannot touch the essential; for though hegemony is ethical-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.67

  But the condition of hegemony is not static, because there is never complete consent; society is never totally united. Flaws in the system of beliefs and values will constantly appear, and there will also be challenges from oppositional value systems. As a result, the ruling class must constantly seek to maintain its position through the mechanisms of cultural production—the family, the churches, the schools, the media and other cultural institutions. Some of this opposition may be crushed by coercion without necessarily damaging the position of the ruling class, as, for instance, where such action can be convincingly justified as a response to problems of ‘law and order’ which are depicted as threatening the whole fabric of society, including the interests of the subordinate classes.68 However, as has been said, the use by the ruling class of large-scale coercion to maintain its rule may indicate that it has lost consent; the subordinate classes no longer subscribe to the old beliefs, and this leads them to challenge the claim of the ruling class to represent their interests, and, therefore, undermines its claim to the consent of those classes. This situation will arise if, for instance, there is serious political or economic uncertainty or instability, or if the ruling class is unable to fulfil promises it has made about a fundamental issue, such as economic prosperity or victory in war. This leads to the exposure of flaws in the governing structure and its supporting ideology and also to the strengthening of oppositional ideologies as people, losing faith in the existing system, cast around for alternatives. If these problems can no longer be circumvented by the mechanisms of cultural production, then the ruling class will resort to increasingly coercive methods of maintaining their position. This will serve further to expose the illegitimacy of their rule and their loss of hegemony.

  Popular literature is an important site on which the struggle for hegemony takes place. As a result popular texts can only be understood if they are seen as part of this struggle. In other words, it is important to recognize that literary texts are

  not mere images of conflicts fought out on another terrain, representations of a history which happens elsewhere; they are themselves a material part of those struggles, pitched standards around which battle is joined, instruments which help to constitute social interests rather than lenses which reflect them.69

  This is why it is possible to see in popular literature elements of different, and opposing, ideologies. Different value systems meet and are mixed in ways that are constantly changing, but which, nevertheless, retain an articulation towards certain fundamental values. Popular literature is popular because it addresses current areas of interest and concern, namely, the tensions between different ideological positions. But the literature is not simply reflecting these tensions, it is engaging in the working out of the relations between men and women and between classes. As a result, the text exposes confusion and contradiction. Shifts in what is of current concern explain why a text which is popular loses that popularity, and, therefore, why a genre, such as the criminal biography, changes. In the next two sections consideration is given, first, to some of the issues which the biographies addressed, and, then, since hegemony is constantly being renegotiated as new issues arise and old ones fade away, the next section considers some of the ways in which the concerns of the biographies altered.

  ISSUES AND TENSIONS IN CRIMINAL BIOGRAPHIES

  The political, economic, social, intellectual and religious upheavals of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries continually threatened to rip the country apart. The uncertainties which began with the Civil War were not ended by the installation of William III as king in 1688. One of the problems which the new constitutional settlement faced was that of establishing its own legitimacy without encouraging the belief that monarchs could routinely be overthrown. This was of particular importance in view of the challenge from the dispossessed Jacobites, which did not fade away until the failure of the ’45, and the unpopularity of some of the Hanoverian line. New power bases were developed. Central government expanded as its control over revenue wealth and patronage grew; expensive foreign wars led to government routinely raising loans and so made financiers politically important; the development of new ways of making money saw the continuing rise not only of people of business, but also of bankers and lawyers. The role of the established church was challenged by Methodism and religion as a whole was undercut by science, although popular religion retained its vigour.

  Contemporary writers on political, social and economic theory tried to grapple with these changes. According to writers working within the civic humanist tradition, the political elite—the gentry—derived their status and authority from land. Income from land relieved the gentry of a dependence on others, particularly on government, for their livelihoods, and gave them an independence in their performance of civic duties which was unattainable by those without such advantages, and this enabled them to pursue national, rather than self-, interest. Indeed, these writers argued that the gentry had, not just a right, but also a duty to govern, and they were, therefore, critical of any neglect by the gentry of that duty. Other writers argued that notions of civic humanism did not fit in a society with a rapidly expanding commercial and financial economy. They rejected the way in which that tradition described the working of society in moral terms, with the ‘good’ gentry leading the rest, not for selfish gain, but for the civic good, and instead argued that the pursuit of self-interest in almost any form was what made a nation thrive. Others a
rgued for a middle way. They struggled to accommodate economic individualism within civic humanism by arguing that the commercial benefits brought by the middle classes were essential to the nation and represented a base from which the middle classes could—indeed, should—gage in politics.70 It is no coincidence that a concern over, and a fascination with, that symbol of social disruption, crime, emerged as a major issue at this time. The number of capital offences was rapidly increased by Parliament between the 1680s and the middle of the next century as the new political order sought to establish the roots of its power. Capital punishment was attached to offences against the post-1688 constitutional settlement, the gathering of tax revenue and property.71

  Criminal biographies were not simply about crime and criminals. Yet the vagueness of the term ‘crime’ enabled the biographies to address powerfully other issues of contemporary importance. ‘Crime’ had no precise legal meaning, and this meant that it could be used to evoke a broad, but imprecise and, therefore, more frightening, range of fears: fear not just of losing property, but also of physical danger, of gangs and a whole criminal underworld, of moral collapse and of anarchy. These fears were then linked to other issues which were addressed in the biographies. As has been argued, by its very nature popular literature concerns itself with the examination of those values which are under strain. The ability to make such literature relevant to the reader’s own concerns is one important way in which it becomes popular, and, also, provides one reason why it loses its popularity as concerns change. The criminal biographies did not simply reproduce the tensions of eighteenth-century society, nor did they present neat resolutions of those tensions, instead they were actively engaged in working them through. It is useful to consider some of these tensions.