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

  DRUNKS, WHORES AND IDLE APPRENTICES

  DRUNKS, WHORES AND IDLE APPRENTICES

  Criminal biographies of the eighteenth century

  Philip Rawlings

  First published 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

  This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

  “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge's collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

  Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

  © 1992 Philip Rawlings: Editorial material, Introduction, Commentary

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Rawlings, Philip Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the 18th Century I. Title 364.10922

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Rawlings, Philip Drunks, whores and idle apprentices: criminal biographies of the eighteenth century/Philip Rawlings. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Criminals—England—History—18th century— Biography. 2. Criminals—England—History—18th century—Biography—History and criticism. I. Title. HV6945.R38 1992 364.′092.′242–dc20 [B] 91–46370

  ISBN 0-203-99110-9 Master e-book ISBN

  ISBN 0-415-05056-1 (Print Edition)

  ’Tis in vain to hope for a Reprieve, The Sheriff’s come down with his Warrant; An Account I behind me must leave Of my Birth, Education and Parents.

  (‘Epistle on Jack Sheppard’, Daily journal, 16 November, 1724)

  There is not perhaps in the world a more agreeable study than that of Biography; nor any thing sought after and read with greater avidity, than the lives of unfortunate men, and those who suffer under the hands of the executioner more than any.

  (The Life and Wonderful Transactions of Mr. Charles

  Speckman, alias Browne, 1763)

  PREFACE

  We can understand much about a society from looking at the way in which it treats its criminals. It is not just the punishments which are revealing, but also the literature. In this book I have brought together a small selection of eighteenth-century accounts written about the lives of contemporary criminals. My primary aim is to bring to a wider reading public a flavour of a body of literature which, while it was extremely popular when published, has been all but forgotten for two hundred years. Although the biographies can stand by themselves, in the General Introduction some of the problems surrounding their use are discussed.

  In the putting together of this book many people have given me assistance, willingly and unwillingly, knowingly and unknowingly. I will refrain both from praising their virtues and from heaping blame upon myself for the faults which the book has; after all, should not those with whom I discussed it and who failed either to point out these faults or to persuade me to change the book, bear some of the blame? However, I did work in various places around the country on this book and I would like to thank the staff of the many libraries and record offices I used including: the British Library, including the Newspaper Library at Colindale; the Guildhall Library; the Public Records Offices at Kew and Chancery Lane; County Records Offices in Surrey, Essex and Somerset; the Greater London Record Office; the John Rylands Library in Manchester; Brunel University Library. The University Library at Aberystwyth was particularly important in the formation of ideas, through the books there, but, just as importantly, through its provision of a place in which to hold discussions with colleagues: my apologies and thanks both to them and to the students who constantly asked us to be quiet. More specifically, I would like to thank Richard Ireland and Ian Bell; the loan of his computer by Peter Wallington was, viewed objectively, somewhat foolhardy, but I prefer to see it as the act of a farsighted individual who has the benefit of good insurance cover. I would also like to thank my father, who read the whole book several times, my mother and Debbie, three people whose boredom thresholds have been seriously tested.

  This book opens with a General Introduction. Its purpose is to provide the novice with not only a discussion of the criminal biographies and their writers and readers, but also an examination of the ways in which scholars have used, or dismissed, these works. The remainder of the book is taken up with reprints of the biographies prefaced by brief introductions. These introductions outline some of the themes which appear in the biographies and provide background and bibliographical information. Each biography is also supplemented by notes intended to clarify the text.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  GLRO: Greater London Record Office

  OBSP: the published reports of the trials held at die Old Bailey

  Ordinary of Newgate's Account; see the General Introduction and the introduction to the Ordinary of Newgate's Account: Mary Young (1741) in this volume

  PRO: Public Record Office (Kew and Chancer)- Lane)

  In the citation of books, pamphlets and essays, square brackets have been used as follows:

  where placed around a writer’s name, such as [H.Walpole], this indicates that the named writer almost certainly wrote the piece even though his or her name does not appear on the title page. If the name is followed by a question mark, such as [H.Walpole?], then the writer was more likely than not H.Walpole;

  where the brackets are placed around a date, such as [1751], or around a place name and date, such as [London, 1751], this indicates that the date of publication was almost certainly 1751, or the place and date of publication were almost certainly London and 1751. The addition of a question mark has the same effect in reducing certainty as above.

  In the chapters where the criminal biographies are reprinted, square brackets around a number, such as [p. 2], indicate the original page breaks.

  The peculiarities of spelling, punctuation and grammar in the original texts have been retained.

  GENERAL INTRODUCTION

  THE BIOGRAPHICAL LITERATURE OF CRIME AND ITS POPULARITY

  During the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century crime provided one of the principal subjects for popular literature. All aspects were covered: the crime itself, the investigation, the trial, the punishment and the life of the offender. The works ranged from newspaper articles through broadsheets and pamphlets to large books, sometimes in several volumes. This book focuses on biographical pamphlets, that is, pamphlets which took as their subjects real people, who had been accused of, usually, a capital crime. Some of these pamphlets proclaim themselves to be autobiographies, although, as is argued later in this General Introduction, it is not easy to decide whether such claims were true or even partly true. These criminal biographies have been the subject of much controversy amongst modern scholars. There is, for example, an argument about the role they played in the development of the novel, and certainly some of the techniques which appear in them were also used by novelists, such as Defoe in Moll Flanders. The problem is further complicated by the claim, which is hard to substantiate, that novelists like Defoe also wrote criminal biographies, and by the difficulty in separating ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in the biographies. One thing is certain: the criminal biography, which became firmly established in the eighteent
h century, continues to flourish up to the present day.

  Although reliable sales figures are not available, there are plenty of reasons for supposing that criminal biographies sold well in the eighteenth century. First, there is the anecdotal evidence. John Dunton, a well-known publisher of the late seventeenth century, financed the more expensive, and less lucrative, side of his business from the profits of his criminal biographies.1The York printer Thomas Gent wrote that in 1722 when he was printing the dying speech of Christopher Layer, who had been hanged for treason, he was so besieged by hawkers anxious for the publication that he was unable to step outside his office until he had finished the work, which took several days.2In 1732 Rev. Piddington was said to have sold the confession of Sarah Malcom, who had been convicted of murder, for £20—the average labourer’s weekly wage was, at that time, somewhere between ten and twenty shillings.3In 1754 the publishers Goadby and Owen issued an apology for their failure to keep pace with the demand for The Discoveries of John Poulter:

  The Press has been kept almost continually going, on the above Work for several Weeks past, yet Orders for great Numbers of them from different Parts of the Country could not be supplied, but as a very large Number is now printed off, and the Press kept still going on it, the Publick may depend on a proper supply for the future.4

  This may, of course, have been merely a publisher puffing his wares, yet evidence of the literature’s popularity comes also from those who saw nothing to applaud in it. In 1750 Horace Walpole complained to a friend of ‘the ridiculous rage’ of buying biographies of criminals,5and in 1786 the commercial success of a lengthy biography of Charles Price, who had been accused of fraud, led to adverse comment in the Press: the Whitehall Evening Post remarked, with disgust, that,

  Since the first appearance of THE MEMOIRS OF CHARLES PRICE, little else has been read or talked of. There have been several thousands already sold, and as many more are now printing! This fact is stated as a proof, that the contemplation of the baseness of human nature is become a more pleasing subject than its virtues. If the life of that excellent man, Dr. Jebb, which would form an admirable contrast to that of Price, was published, in all probability the sale would not amount to the expence of advertising it!!!6

  Second, the sheer number of different criminal biographies gives some indication of their popularity. Aside from newspaper articles, somewhere between two and three thousand biographies have survived from the eighteenth century.7Notorious cases attracted more than one publication: the trial of Mary Blandy in 1752 for the murder of her father led to more than thirty pamphlets, books and broadsheets, as did the controversy in 1753–4 surrounding the alleged kidnapping of Elizabeth Canning. Biographies often went through many editions: A Warning to Youth: The Life and Death of Thomas Savage appeared in at least twenty-two editions in the early eighteenth century; The Discoveries of John Poulter went through seventeen editions between 1753 and 1779; and A Narrative of all the Robberies, Escapes, &c. of John Sheppard ran to eight editions in the space of two months at the end of 1724. 8

  READERS

  It is sometimes argued that the expansion of the book trade which began in the seventeenth century was the result of an increase in literacy. But the connection between the trade and readership is more complex: was it advances in literacy which led to more publications, or was it more publications which led to more readers? Looking just at literacy rates ignores other issues which had an effect on the book trade, such as changes in the organization of the publishing business and the enactment of copyright laws. In any case, the various methods of measuring literacy rates are fraught with difficulties.9For instance, the ability to sign one’s name cannot be assumed to imply the ability to read, or even to write. On the other hand, since reading is learnt before writing, those who could read may not have been able to write, although the likelihood is that the two rates would have been fairly close to one another. Moreover, even if it were possible to calculate the number of people who were able to read, it could not be assumed that they actually used that skill. As might be imagined, measuring reading habits is even more hazardous than estimating literacy: for example, using the sales of a book, such as the Bible, provides an uncertain guide, since it is unclear whether those who bought bibles did so in order to read them, or simply to possess them as religious artefacts.10

  Turning to the question of who read criminal biographies, it is typically assumed that the bulk of the readers of popular literature came from the labouring classes, but the evidence for this is problematic. The anecdotal evidence rests on sparse and rather exceptional sources. For instance, in her valuable study of late seventeenth-century chapbooks, Spufford refers to the reading habits of John Bunyan and the poet John Clare.11Aside from the problem of using Clare as evidence for the habits of those who lived a hundred years before he was born, neither he nor Bunyan could be said to have been typical of labouring people, so their reading habits cannot be assumed to have reflected those of the generality of their social class. It is true that Clare wrote of his father that he ‘could read a little in a bible or testament and was very fond of the supersti[ti]ous tales that are hawked about a sheet for a penny’, but he also wrote that his mother ‘knew not a single letter’ and that his neighbours denounced reading as ‘a sure indication of laziness’.12

  Of course, these criticisms do not prove that the poor were not able to read or that they did not read crime literature. On the other hand, reading many of the criminal biographies would have needed more than the simple literacy skills required for the chapbooks in Spufford’s study since the texts are sometimes fairly sophisticated. Perhaps stronger evidence on this issue is the price. The labouring people might have been able to afford halfpenny and penny broadsheets and chapbooks and have had the skills to be able to read them,13but many of the biographies cost sixpence and some as much as several shillings and so would surely have seemed expensive to all but the better-paid workers. However, there is evidence that people clubbed together to buy newspapers which were then read to the group by literate members,14and there may have been similar arrangements for other literature, including criminal biographies. But, on the whole, it seems likely that, while some members of the labouring classes may well have read, or listened to the reading of, criminal biographies, the publishers looked elsewhere for their main market.

  Little consideration has been given to the readership of criminal biographies by the eighteenth-century ruling elite: Richetti makes the curious remark that such reading matter ‘must have appeared to the educated literate elite of the eighteenth century precisely what comic books and television seem to the contemporary guardians of cultural standards’.15Yet, there is plenty of evidence of the gentry’s fascination with crime and its literature: James Boswell wrote that having read criminal biographies in his youth gave him ‘a sort of horrid eagerness’ to attend hangings; and Horace Walpole, in spite of his expressions of contempt for criminal biographies, had many examples in his library at Strawberry Hill.16

  However, it is likely that the core of the readership for crime literature came from the same broad social group as those who published it: the tradespeople, lawyers, clergy, doctors and so forth who composed the middling classes. The price of the publications was more readily within their range, indeed there was often no need for the urban middling classes to buy them since many could be read free of charge, or for a small fee, in bookshops and coffee-houses.17The biographies themselves typically suggest this readership. It was common for them to include advice on crime prevention aimed at, in particular, tradespeople. Furthermore, as will be argued later, much of the literature portrays crime as originating in the lack of self-discipline and idleness of the labouring people, and implicitly asserts that the resolution of these problems lies not in the loose control operated by the landed gentry, which, while possibly suitable for rural areas, is regarded as incompatible with the problems of large cities like London, but in the imposition by middling-class employers of a rigorous discipline
at the workplace.

  WRITERS AND THE PROBLEMS OF AUTHENTICITY AND ACCURACY

  The great bulk of the biographies claim to be either autobiographical or written by someone with special access to the prisoner, such as a prison chaplain like the Ordinary of Newgate. Contemporary critics argued that even if there was contact between biographer and subject, many biographers showed scant regard for the facts of the individual’s life and were motivated by considerations other than accuracy.

  The main focus for such criticism was the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, a publication that appeared after each hanging day in London, an event which could take place as many as eight times a year.18Critics argued both that the Account was inaccurate and that the Ordinary was motivated by mercenary, rather than Christian, principles. Rev. Samuel Smith, who, with George Croom, established the Account as a periodical publication in 1684, came in for some sharp attacks: the poet Thomas Brown alleged that Smith wrote well of prisoners who paid him and badly of those who did not.19Smith’s successor, Dr John Allen, did little to improve matters when he was dismissed in 1700 following accusations that he had, amongst other things, extorted money from prisoners. So it was that when Paul Lorrain was appointed in 1700, both the post of Ordinary and the Account already had poor reputations.20His most famous, and most persistent, critic was Daniel Defoe. Defoe’s first attack followed the publication in 1703 of a memorial sermon preached for Thomas Cook, who had been hanged for murder. In it Lorrain had celebrated Cook’s repentance in prison as showing that even life-long sinners could obtain divine mercy.21In A Hymn to the Funeral Sermon, Defoe pointed out that if this were the case then there was no incentive for people to live honest lives, adding, for good measure, that Lorrain only ‘Sainted’ those prisoners who paid him. Later he wrote that Lorrain was ‘the Object of almost every Body’s Scorn; and I could never hear of above two People who spoke favourably of him, and those were the Printer and the Publisher of his Dying Speech Papers’.22Lorrain consistently rejected the allegations that he took money from prisoners, and certainly the City of London, who had been quick to sack Allen on this ground, never seems to have taken any action against him. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence in Lorrain’s Accounts that he did not readily believe expressions of repentance, although his caution may have been the result of Defoe’s attack: in 1715, just before Captain Alexander Dalzell was to be hanged for piracy, he showed signs of penitence, but, Lorrain commented, ‘whether that Repentance was sincere, and not too late, is much to be doubted’.23