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

by PHILIP RAWLINGS

  Individualism

  It has been argued that, like the novel, the criminal biography was an expression of individualism which reflected the rise and dominance of the middle classes.72 The problems with this view are, first, that the middle class had been a significant force, both in the economy and in government, well before the early eighteenth century, second, that it did not become the politically dominant class at that time, and, third, that the biographies are not an unqualified expression of the virtues of individualism. However, these texts are biographies, so the individual has a role.

  To those who hold the view that individual endeavour creates the commercial wealth on which governments and peoples depend, the notion that inherited status is the only route to political power might be an anathema. Yet, the middle classes in the eighteenth century did not seek to overturn the political dominance of the landed gentry; after all, the rich were the biggest consumers. Indeed, among the middle classes, emulation rather than revolution was the more common position. Commentators, such as Defoe, expressed great concern that the desire to emulate the gentry led people to neglect their businesses. The problem was that, although financial wealth had importance, social success and political power were bound up with the acquisition of status through land ownership or marriage. Of course, those who sought status, generally, wished to maintain and even reinforce it. Moreover, since the creation of commercial wealth in this pretechnological era was believed to depend on the existence of a large and cheap workforce, the maintenance of social division was regarded as important since it was necessary to prevent the great mass of working people from shifting up the social scale and out of productive employment. So, from several viewpoints the whiff of egalitarianism inherent in notions of individualism was no more pleasing an odour to the middle classes than it was to the gentry.

  The contradictions emerge in popular art and literature. The success of the industrious apprentice in Hogarth’s series of engravings, Idleness and Industry (1747), is achieved through marriage to his employer’s daughter and is measured not in terms of money, but by becoming Lord Mayor of London. In that series it is not the industrious apprentice, but the idle apprentice who is the consummate individualist, and his life ends on the gallows at Tyburn. Similarly, the criminal biographies focus on the evil consequences of extreme individualism. Ian Watt’s comment about Defoe’s fictional character Moll Flanders could equally be applied to the criminal biographies of the period:

  Moll Flanders…is a characteristic product of modern individualism in assuming that she owes it to herself to achieve the highest economic and social rewards, and in using every available method to carry out her resolve.73

  It is not the possibility of upward mobility, as exemplified by Hogarth’s industrious apprentice, which is focused on in the biographies, but rather the instability caused by individualism. The image presented is that the labouring poor only obtain upward social mobility through illegitimate means and as a result any repositioning in society is temporary.

  Apprentices and ‘the Great Law of Subordination’

  Concern over apprentices, especially in London, was a feature of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries: there were, perhaps, 20,000 by 1700, and they had a tradition of radicalism and solidarity. This seems to sit behind the link between apprentices and crime which is such a common feature of biographies in this period. A typical plot was that of the hardworking apprentice from a poor but honest background, who, through contact with ‘bad company’—usually, a woman described as a ‘whore’—becomes a criminal. A wave of conduct books directed at apprentices, which appeared during this period, made the same point. Their central concern was with what the printer and novelist Samuel Richardson called, in The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), ‘the present Depravity of Servants’.74 Similarly, Defoe, writing in 1727, identified the problem as being that, ‘the state of apprenticeship is not a state of servitude now, and hardly of subjection’,75 and this was the result of the breach of ‘the Great Law of Subordination’. In a book of that title, written in 1724, he had argued, of apprentices, that ‘more of them are ruin’d, debauch’d, and come to nothing, for want of Subordination, and being under Government, than was wont to be the Case’.76 Vice was like a disease, and youths, especially male youths, were particularly susceptible to it. According to The Servants Calling (1725), ‘the Young and Unexperienc’d are soonest tainted by the bad Air of Society, being aptest at Imitation’.77 The view of the conduct books was that youths could only be protected within the disciplined environment of a properly regulated apprenticeship; similarly, although, as Sheppard is made to put it, the apprenticeship might appear to the apprentice to be ‘a Yoke of Servitude’ (The History of…John Sheppard; see p. 49), it is that very quality which recommends it.

  The conduct books outlined what this regulated apprenticeship would involve. According to Richardson, the apprentice was not to marry, nor to gamble, nor to go to theatres or alehouses, nor to follow ‘the Fopperies and Apish Fashions of the Men of mode’, nor to break the sabbath. The guiding principle was: ‘you have no Portion of Time during the Term of your Apprenticeship, that you can call your own;…you are accountable for every Hour to your master’.78 So, although the books value the importance of the training which apprenticeship should give, they give more emphasis to this element of discipline. The other side of the coin was that the conduct books and the criminal biographies were implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—critical of the employers who failed to live up to the ideals. This connects with a reworked version of the civic humanist tradition: in urban societies, such as London, it was up to the middling classes to look beyond the short term and, through the employment relationship, to take on some of the civic obligations of government which were performed in the country by the gentry. In one of his most popular books, The Family Instructor (1720), Defoe wrote that ‘a Master is a Parent’, and as such owed a duty of care to the apprentices for ‘their Souls and their Bodies’;79 he, therefore, regretted that, ‘Custom has wickedly of late Years seem’d to discharge Masters of this Duty.’80 He later wrote that, ‘Servants out of government are like soldiers without an officer, fit for nothing but to rob and plunder’:

  To leave a youth without government is indeed unworthy of any honest master; he cannot discharge himself as a master; for instead of taking care of him he indeed casts him off, abandons him, and, to put it into scripture words, he leads him into temptation; nay, he goes farther, to use another scripture expression, he delivers him over to Satan…. [W]hat servants can a man expect when he leaves them to their own government, not regarding whether they serve GOD or the Devil?81

  Richardson made the link between these conduct books and the biographies:

  Let the Sessions-Paper and the Dying-Speeches of unhappy Criminals tell the rest: Let them inform the inconsiderate Youth, by the Confessions of the dying malefactors, how naturally, as it were Step by Step, Swearing, Cursing, Profaneness, Drunkeness, Whoredom, Theft, Robbery, Murder, and the Gallows, succeed one another!82

  The point is illustrated in The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard: although he was previously an industrious apprentice, on meeting Elizabeth Lyon Sheppard ‘contracted an ill Distemper’ (p. 32), namely, an addiction, first, to vice and, later, to crime. But some blame is laid at the door of the employer. When Sheppard ‘began to dispute with his Master’, his master ‘a mild, sober, honest Man, indulg’d him’. Another biography of Sheppard is even more explicit: there Sheppard says, of his period as an apprentice,

  I believe if less Liberty had been allow’d me then, I should scarce have had so much Sorrow and Confinement after. My Master and Mistress with their Children were strict Observers of the Sabbath, but ‘tis too well known in the Neighbourhood that I had too great a Loose given to my evil Inclinations, and spent the Lord’s Day as I thought convenient.83

  Similarly, in 1684 John Gower allegedly told the Ordinary of Newgate that it was through ‘the Indulgence of his
Master to whom he was Apprentice, that he suffered them to mispend the Sabbath-days, which was the first Step to Ruine’.84 Nine years later, the Ordinary reported that a pickpocket called John Simons had told him that ‘Had his Master…held a strict hand over him, he had not gone far astray from God, nor dared to have done evil Actions, but being left to his own evil Inclinations’ he fell into crime.85 William Shelton, hanged in 1739, supposedly said that ‘my Master being in a bad State of Health, was not able to give me such Correction as was absolutely requisite for young Sparks in my Lax way of Living’.86

  Having said all this, it is not difficult to see how apprentices might have read the biographies in a rather different light. To an apprentice the charge that an apprenticeship was a ‘Yoke of Servitude’ often rang true: apprentices were routinely exploited as sources of cheap labour and physically abused by their employers; their training was often inadequate as employers tried to ensure that they would not become trade rivals; in some industries, like carpentry, the work was very heavy and, as a consequence, a person’s working life short, so that the seven years spent in an apprenticeship earning little or nothing might, understandably, be resented. The problems were added to by the breaking down in some old trades of the requirement that people serve apprenticeships, and also the development of new trades which could be practised without having served an apprenticeship. Plenty of apprentices terminated their apprenticeships by the simple expedient of running away—a course of action which might end with them in the house of correction. Hints of the apprentice’s side of the story do surface in the biographies. For instance, there is a passage in The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard in which Sheppard

  began to dispute with his Master; telling him that his way of Jobbing from House to House, was not sufficient to furnish him with a due Experience in his Trade; and that if he would not set out to undertake some Buildings, he would step into the World for better Information.

  But, although many writers recognized the problems faced by apprentices, few—and certainly not those who wrote criminal biographies—suggested that apprenticeships should be scrapped. The rapidity of change during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries created a conservatism, which, while not seeking to push aside those changes, did try to impress on the economically powerful the need to maintain authority. Apprentices were an easily identifiable group with a reputation for disorder, and to some extent the difficulties with them symbolized more general concerns about the breakdown of the hierarchical social order upon which not only discipline, but also economic wealth and military strength were believed to depend. The biographies engage in the negotiation between a modernized version of civic humanism, according to which economically powerful citizens have a duty to ensure social control and good government, and the philosophy of economic individualism, in which everyone pursues her or his own self-interest, although it is the advantages of the former and the disadvantages of the latter which are emphasized in the biographies: the lesson is that of the idle rather than the industrious apprentice.

  Gender

  To the issue of class subordination inherent in the way the biographies treat the questions of individualism and apprenticeship is added the question of gender subordination. In the biographies, although both the apprentice and the employer are partly blamed for the collapse, the need to avoid too much criticism of the apprenticeship means that the immediate cause of the breakdown of the relationship is ascribed to another cause, namely, a woman. In many of these biographies the women are one-dimensional characters, and, having broken the apprenticeship, they vanish from the narrative. Nevertheless, they are being depicted as powerful, and their power derives from their independence of any relationship of subordination to men. The power is described as illegitimate and the women as whores. Since men in the eighteenth century ‘were intended (so men claimed) to excel in reason, business, action; women’s fate lay in being submissive, modest, docile, virtuous, maternal and domestic’,87 then the world of crime was a world-turned-upside-down, with women dominant and men subordinate. The consequences of this empowerment of women emerge most clearly in the biography of Mary Young, reprinted in this book (p. 121). Her gang resembles a nation-state, with its own hierarchy, laws and treasury, and reveals a genius for criminal organization unparalleled by men like Sheppard and Dalton. So independence empowers women, that power results in evil, and this justifies the subordination of women.

  The way in which the biographies present women also tended to undermine the view that the male offenders, merely by being written about, were being portrayed as heroes. As is more fully discussed in the introduction to The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard, the depiction of their subordination to women, who are portrayed as ‘whores’ rather than women, presents these men as subhuman rather than superhuman, and this is underlined by irrational behaviour, such as their drunkenness. Implicit is the unfavourable contrast between them and those men who lived within relationships structured around the division of labour through waged work and the subordination of women. The biographies are engaging in the contemporary struggles over the definitions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ which can also be found in, for example, changing practices at the workplace and different attitudes to marriage.

  London

  In view of its size, it is not surprising that London criminals dominate the biographies. To a large extent the focus in the biographies on apprentices symbolized a more general concern about the problem of youths in London. As one historian has commented:

  One of the most striking demographic characteristics of the London population was its high proportion of the young, the geographically mobile and the unmarried. The migration to London of young town and country dwellers caused its growth, a tendency reflected in the fact that among those hanged two thirds were born outside London.88

  This immigration accelerated in the late seventeenth century and undermined the already stretched structures of London authority. The sort of face-to-face government which was at least possible in the country was never easy in a large city like London, and it became less and less so as the communities of the ruling and the ruled moved into separate, self-contained areas. The fear of the London labouring classes as unknowable and ungovernable surfaces in many works in which the city is unfavourably compared with the country: the former anarchic and unhealthy, the latter orderly and fecund. As one commentator put it: ‘in London amongst the lower classes all is anarchy, drunkenness, and thievery; in the country good order, sobriety and honesty’.89 Demographers, such as Thomas Short in his New Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1750), claimed that the population in London was declining, which was an alarming prospect given the belief that national wealth was directly related to the size of the working population. He argued that economic expansion, symbolized by London, was morally corrupting: the poor drank themselves to death on gin and the rich were idle parasites who made no real contribution to society.

  The contrast between the city and the country features in many of the criminal biographies. According to his biography, John Adamson lived in Lynn, Norfolk, but, ‘Being weary of a Country Life, and desirous of seeing London, he some Years ago came to Town, and having neither Friends nor Acquaintance here he was put to great straits how to live’. He turned to crime, was caught, convicted, condemned and hanged in 1739. Shortly before he died, the Ordinary of Newgate described him as ‘miserably poor and nak’d’ and ‘a little craz’d’.90 Of Mary Edmondson, hanged in 1759 for the murder of her aunt in Rotherhithe, it was said that she had been ‘bred in a Country Place where were few or no Temptations to Debauchery or Extravagance, these Rocks upon which so many of the Female Sex are split, especially in and about London and Westminster’.91

  London was a metaphor for the moral concerns which many had about the expansion of the economy, including those who supported that expansion. It also symbolized the division between the rulers and the ruled. In London the ruled are unknown and unknowable
to the rulers, and the view of many writers, such as John Brown in An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), was that the rulers were themselves so morally corrupted by the city that they had no desire to know the ruled. For Henry Fielding, writing in 1751, London was like ‘a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia’.92 But, of course, there was another side to all this, namely that, although London was a place of crime and disorder and a source of moral corruption, it was also the centre of wealth and power.

  CHANGES IN THE LITERATURE

  Those few surveys of the biographical literature which acknowledge that it changed during the eighteenth century do so only in the most perfunctory fashion. Chandler and Richetti agree that by 1730 the development of newspaper crime reporting and ‘elaborate fictions’, such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), meant that ‘the popularity of the separate criminal pamphlet was on the wane’.93 This assertion is based not on historical fact, but on the belief that because more sophisticated publications were available then this ‘bad art’ must have gone into decline. The historian, Linebaugh, on the other hand, implies that the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account was a relatively stable phenomenon; he declares that it ‘enjoyed one of the widest markets that printed prose narratives could obtain in the eighteenth century’.94 He fails to explain why the Accounts all but disappeared in the 1760s. Such a dramatic change in the fortunes of what had been a leading force in the book trade in criminal biographies needs to be considered since it suggests that some changes did occur in the literature, and since they do not seem to have occurred as early as Richetti and Chandler claim, then, presumably, the explanations they put forward need reconsidering.