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

by PHILIP RAWLINGS

  One important influence was the rise to prominence of Henry Fielding and his stepbrother John Fielding after 1748. As magistrates at Bow Street they were key figures in the criminal justice system in London, a position they exploited in the wake of a crime panic which gripped the capital from 1748. This began with the apprehension caused by the prospect of a rapid demobilization of the Navy and Army at the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. Apprehension seemed to turn to reality as newspapers reported stories of the involvement of soldiers and sailors in thefts, robberies and riots. As has been mentioned, London symbolized in the biographies the division between the ruled and the rulers which made the former unknowable and ungovernable by the latter. This failure of authority seemed also to be exemplified in the resort to deterrence through the use of public punishments.

  The Fieldings, especially John, claimed to be able to render knowable the city and the criminals through mechanisms of surveillance, such as the use of paid officers and the collection and exchange of information. Being adept at public relations, they were able to open up and publicize their work and, at the same time, emphasize its arduous nature and its importance through their own writings, through advertisements for information on crimes and criminals, and through reports in the press of their lengthy examinations at Bow Street of victims, witnesses and suspects.95 The Fieldings agreed with the view of the criminal lifestyle as conforming to the sort of overarching pattern described in the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account whereby sin led to crime, but their work demonstrated that there was no inevitable link between that lifestyle and the gallows because the end result was often only arrived at by the intervention of justices like the Fieldings. Although this point should not be overstated since private involvement in the prosecution of crime was still at the centre of the criminal justice system, what the Fieldings offered as a solution to crime depended not on a tighter apprenticeship, which had, in any case, never gained acceptance amongst either the apprentices or their employers, but, instead, on a bureaucratized police structure.

  Certainly, the Fieldings were keen to boast of the success of their new policing plans: in 1767 John Fielding claimed that all the gangs operating in and around London during the previous fifteen years had been broken up; the following year he declared that it was impossible for criminals ‘to continue their Outrages for any Time, or, as usual, to collect themselves into large and dangerous Gangs’; and in 1770 he told a select committee of the House of Commons that no London street robber had escaped detection for twenty years.96 He presented the pre-trial work of the justice, not what happened in the trial courts, as the central feature of crime control. Paradoxically, the reports of Old Bailey trials produced by the Gurneys from the 1740s, by presenting a much fuller picture of all the events that led to the trial, rather than the often very brief summary which had previously been published, also took the spotlight away from the trial and punishment itself. From the 1750s onwards an increasing number of the biographies included this new perspective by looking not just at the lifestyle of the subject, but also at the process of her or his detection. Indeed, a new strand of crime literature emerged in which the detection process was the main, sometimes the only, topic.97

  This increased exposure of the criminal justice system may have been one factor behind the appearance in the crime literature of criticisms of the trial and the penal system. On a general level, the Fieldings themselves took part in this with, amongst other things, their attacks on the rule that no one could be convicted on the evidence of a self-confessed felon unless that evidence was corroborated by another witness, a rule which, they argued, hindered the breaking of criminal gangs. Many of the biographies also engaged in a critique of the verdict reached in individual trials. This really got underway with the cases of Mary Blandy in 1752, Elizabeth Canning in 1753–4 and Mary Edmondson in 1759.98 Other biographies in the second half of the eighteenth century alleged that the leniency of the penal system was a cause of higher crime: for instance, A Genuine Account of the Life, Robberies, Trial and Execution of William Cox (1773) urges the increased use of the death penalty on the ground that transportation allows people like Cox to continue their crimes in the penal colonies or in England, to which they are able to return easily.99

  It is surely no coincidence that, as the literature of crime, including the biographies, became more sophisticated and more critical in its discussion of crime and the criminal justice system, the Accounts, with their simplistic portrayal of the progression to the gallows, began to disappear. But there were also other, longer-term pressures which reduced the importance of the Accounts. The improved reporting of trials, both in specialist publications like the OBSP and in the biographies, showed events as linked together through cause and effect, and the offender as an individual who is rational and responsible and whose actions can be rationally explained, rather than as directed by a divinely ordained progression from sin to the gallows.

  Indeed, it can be argued that, although religion featured in many of the biographies throughout the eighteenth century, its importance, even in the Ordinary’s Account, was actually negligible. As I argue in the introduction to the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account of Mary Young (1741), although the biographies produced by the prison chaplain at Newgate were in one sense religious works, their commercial success rested not on this, but on their claim to accuracy and authenticity because of his unique access to the prisoners (see pp. 113–17). Market rivals, such as the biographies of Sheppard and Dalton reprinted in this book (pp. 47 and 85), did not seek to mimic the religious aspects, other than in a fairly minimal way; instead they aimed to displace the popularity of the Accounts by claiming greater accuracy and authenticity. This led to the piling on of more detail: more street names, names of people, dates, trial reports, letters and so forth. Even at the end of a biography when religion enters the narrative in the form of a confession and repentance, the test of that repentance depends on the accuracy and completeness of the detail in the confession. The divine is rationalized by the presentation of facts; the uncheckable relies on the checkable truth of street names: as McKeon argues in his discussion of early novels, ‘a material epistemology is given the task of demonstrating a truth that is ultimately spiritual’.100

  These are some of the ways in which the criminal biography changed during the century. It is worth emphasizing that the history of the criminal biography in the eighteenth century was not unidirectional, nor were such changes as it underwent total, sudden or the product of a simple relationship with certain events. Understanding changes in the literature is not simply a matter of identifying a time and an event as denoting a clean break with the past. Although it may be true that particular events provide a push in a certain direction, change is rarely instant and total, but more often it involves a dynamic discourse between present and past, in which the new is never entirely new and the old never entirely forgotten. Nevertheless, the point to be made is less that of how accurately the changes are described here, but that the literature should be examined within the terms of the traditions of crime literature and the commercial interests of the book trade, and also as part of the general social, economic, political, legal and intellectual context of the period.

  FURTHER READING

  Readers will find, as I did, that a slang dictionary is of great value: recommended are E.Partridge, The Penguin Dictionary of Historical Slang, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972 and E.Partridge, A Dictionary of the Underworld, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950, reprinted, Ware, Wordsworth, 1989.

  For those who are unfamiliar with the history of crime and criminal law in the eighteenth century, there are a number of excellent books. Particularly recommended, because they are good surveys of their respective periods, readily available and reasonably priced, are J.A.Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England 1550–1750, London and New York, Longman, 1984 and C.Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750–1900, London and New York, Longman, 1987. Outstanding, but slightly more expensive, is J.Beattie, Crime an
d the Courts in England 1660– 1800, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986. The best modern biography of an eighteenth-century criminal, and one which provides useful insights into crime during that period, is G.Howson, Thief-taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild, 1970, republished as It Takes a Thief: the Life and Times of Jonathan Wild, London, Cresset Library, 1987. For a general discussion of recent historical writing in this area see P.Rawlings, ‘Recent writings on crime, criminal law, criminal justice, and punishment in the Early Modern Period’ in W.D.Hines (ed.), English Legal History: A Bibliography and Guide to the Literature, New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1990. A more general discussion of the law and legal system is provided by W.R.Cornish and G.de N.Clark, Law and Society in England 1750–1950, London, Sweet & Maxwell, 1989.

  On the general social history of the period there have been a huge number of books, but an excellent starting point is provided by R.Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1990, which also has a valuable reading list. For the economic developments see M.Berg, The Age of Manufactures: Industry, innovation and work in Britain, 1700–1820, London, Fontana, 1985. A good introduction to contemporary thinking on the economy and society is S. Copley (ed.), Literature and the Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England, London, Croom Helm, 1984.

  On women see I.Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850, London, Virago, 1981; S.Amussen, An Ordered Society: Class and Gender in Early Modern England, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988; and A.Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England 1770–1845, London and New York, Pandora, 1987. Many of the biographies centre on London, for which see M.D.George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966. It is also worth dipping into contemporary writers; particularly recommended is D.Defoe, Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1966. On popular literature in general see V.E.Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide, London, 1977, and on criminal biographies in particular see L.Faller, Turned to Account: the Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth-Century England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, and I.A.Bell, Literature and Crime in Augustan England, London, Routledge, 1991. For reprints of some Tudor crime literature see G.Salgado (ed.), Cony-Catchers and Bawdy Baskets: An Anthology of Elizabethan Low Life, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1972.

  The question of the origin of the novel is examined in I.Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1963; Watt’s views have most recently been challenged in a densely argued work by M. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740, London, Radius, 1988. More general surveys of popular culture in the eighteenth century include R.Malcomson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1975 and P.Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, Wildwood House, 1988. There is now a huge amount of theoretical work on popular culture, but amongst the more accessible are: R.Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1958; R.Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1963; and The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1965; T.Bennett, G.Martin, C.Mercer and J.Woollacott (eds), Culture, Ideology and Social Process, London, Open University, 1981 includes a useful discussion of leading theorists, including Gramsci.

  Finally, theoretical developments in oral history promise much of value for those interested in criminal lives: see R.Samuel and P.Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By, London, Routledge, 1990.

  NOTES

  1 J.Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton Late Citizen of London, London, 1705, p. 87. Also S.Parks, John Dunton and the English Book Trade: A Study of His Career with a Checklist of His Publications,London, 1976, p. 45.

  2 T.Gent, The Life of Thomas Gent, Printer, of York, London, 1832, pp. 140–1.

  3 Gentleman’s Magazine, 1733, vol. III, p. 137.

  4 Whitehall Evening Post, 21 February 1754.

  5 W.S.Lewis (ed.), The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, 48 volumes, London, 1937–83, vol. 20, p. 199.

  6 Whitehall Evening Post, 7–9 March 1786. Also General Advertiser, 9 March 1786.

  7 The largest single collection is in the British Library.

  8 Of course, a publisher may simply be trying to shift stock by pretending that a biography is so popular that a new printing has become necessary.

  9 See L.Stone, ‘Literacy and education in England 1640–1900’, Past and Present, 1969, vol. 42, pp. 69–139; R.S.Schofield, ‘The measurement of literacy in preindustrial England’ in J.Goody, (ed.), Literacy in Traditional Societies, Cambridge, 1968; D.Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England, Cambridge, 1980; R.A.Houston, ‘The development of literacy: northern England’, Economic History, 1982, 2nd series, vol. XXXV, pp. 199–216.

  10 E.Robinson (ed.), John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, Oxford, 1986, p. 5.

  11 M.Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England,Cambridge, 1981, chapters I–III.

  12 Robinson, John Clare’s Autobiographical Writings, pp. 2 and 5.

  13 P.Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, Aldershot, 1988, pp. 253–4.

  14 ibid., p. 265; J.G.Rule, The Labouring Classes in Early Industrial England, 1750–1850, London, 1986, p. 135.

  15 J.J.Richetti, Popular Fiction Before Richardson: Narrative Patterns 1700–1739, Oxford, 1969, p. 9.

  16 On Boswell see F.A.Pottle (ed.), Boswell’s London Journal 1762–1763, London, 1950, p. 252; M.Bailey (ed.), Boswell’s Column, London, 1951, pp. 343–8; G.B. Hill and L.F.Powell (eds), Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 6 volumes, London, 1934, vol. II, p. 93, vol. III, p. 532, vol. IV, p. 328. For a report of Boswell and Sir Joshua Reynolds leading the condemned onto the scaffold outside Newgate prison see Public Advertiser, 7 July 1785. On Walpole see: A.T.Hazen, A Catalogue of Horace Walpole’s Library, 3 volumes, New Haven, 1969; Lewis, Correspondence of Horace Walpole, vol. 2, pp. 34–5, vol. 9, p. 400, vol. 13, p. 23, Lewis, Correspondence of Horace Walpole, vol. 2, pp. 34–5, vol. 9, p. 400, vol. 13, p. 23, vol. 20, pp. 99, 101, 106, 168-9, 188, 199, vol. 24, pp. 152–4, vol. 28, pp. 192, 288, 289, vol. 30, p. 490, vol. 32, pp. 360-1, vol. 35, p. 6. Walpole also owned a portrait (now in the National Gallery of Scotland) of Sarah Malcom, who was hanged in 1732 for murder: [H.Walpole], A Description of the Villa of Mr. Horace Walpole, youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middx. With an Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Curiosities, &c., London, 1784, p. 23.

  17 The British Library has three pamphlets on the case of Mary Blandy (hanged at Oxford in 1752 for murder) which originally came from Tom’s Coffee-House, London. In 1708 it was said that one prisoner refused to assist in the writing of his biography because he did not wish to become ‘the Sport and Ridicule of vain idle Fellows in Coffee-Houses’: The Life and Penitent death of John Mawgridge, Gent. Who was Executed for the Murder of Captain Cope. Penn’d from his own Account of himself, and approv’d of by him, before his Death, London, 1708, p. 2.

  18 See the introduction to The Ordinary of Newgate’s Account: Mary Young (1741), pp. 113– 19.

  19 T.Brown, ‘An Elegy on that most Orthodox and Painstaking Divine, Mr. Sam. Smith, Ordinary of Newgate, who dy’d of a Quinsey, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, the 24th of August. 1698’, in T. Brown, The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, 5 volumes, London, 5th edn, 1720–1, vol. IV, pp. 41–3; T.Brown, ‘An Epitaph upon that profound and learned Casuist, the late Ordinary of Newgate’, in ibid., vol. IV, pp. 43–5.

  20 On Allen see An Account of a New and Strange Discovery; That was made by John Sheirly, alias Davis, & Joseph Fisher, The same Day of their Execution, Relating to the Ordinary of Newgate: With a True Copy of the Retition, that was Presented to the Lord Mayor, by the Prisoners of Newgate, concerning the same with many other remarkable Particulars, Lon
don, 1700; Capt. Charles Newy’s Case, Impartially Laid Open, London, 1700; Mr. Allen’s Vindication; or, Remarks upon a late Scandalous pamphlet, Entituled; A strange and New discovery, &c., London, 1700; The Life and Conversation Of the Pretended Captain Charles Newey; Together with some Remarks upon A Scurrilous and Scandalous Pamphlet, called Newey’s Case, London, 1700.

  21 P.Lorrain, Walking with God: Shewn in a Sermon Preach’d at the Funeral of Mr. Thomas Cook, In the Parish-Church of St.James Clerkenwell, Aug. 13, 1703, London, 1703.

  22 [D.Defoe], A Hymn to the Funeral Sermon, London, 1703; [D.Defoe], A Trip through London: containing Observations on Men and Things, London, 8th edn, 1728, pp. 50–1. Also [D.Defoe?], The History of the Press Yard, London, 1717, 46–53; [D.Defoe], A Trip through the Town. Containing Observations on he Humours and Manners of the Age, London, 4th edn, 1735, p. 24; Mercurius Politicus, March 1718, p. 159. For Lorrain’s reply see [P.Lorrain], Remarks On the Author of the Hymn to the Pillory. With an Answer to the Hymn to the Funeral Sermon, London, 1703. Generally, see R.R.Singleton, ‘Defoe, Moll Flanders and the Ordinary of Newgate’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 1976, vol. 24, pp. 407– 13.