Category: Newgate Calendar

Jack ‘Sixteen-String’ Rann (1750–74)

SBLeave a comment

The eighteenth century was without a doubt the golden age of highwaymen, being the era in which robbers such as Jack Sheppard (1702–24), Dick Turpin (1705–39), and James Maclaine (1724–50). Most of the ‘celebrity’ highwaymen lived in the earlier part of the century, however, and as the Georgian era progressed, highwaymen were increasingly condemned in newspapers and by others. There was one outlier, however: his name was John ‘Sixteen-String Jack’ Rann who, with his fine clothes and polite manner, was the last of the gentlemanly highwaymen.[i]

Rann1
Illustration of Jack Rann and Miss Roche from 1774.

Rann was born in Bath of honest and respectable parents who, although they were destitute, raised him well. They could not afford any schooling for him, so at an early age he was sent to work. He made money by selling goods from a cart and through this formed a friendship with an aristocrat who was visiting the spas at Bath. The town in this period was what is known as a ‘Spa Town’. The underground springs were assumed to possess restorative powers and the great and the good flocked there, as well as to other places such as Harrogate, to ‘take the waters’. The lady took Rann into her service when he was about 12 years old and he returned to London with her when the spa season was over. By all accounts, the noblewoman was very pleased with his work. Rann, however, wanted to be his own boss and so, parting ways with the lady amicably, he resolved to set up his own business.

Rann 2
Title page to the earliest account of Rann’s life, c. 1774.

He could not read and write, but he knew how to drive a cart and had saved up a little capital from his time working in service. So he immediately purchased a post-chaise and started his own business as what we might now think of as an upper-class taxi driver. He would drive clients home after their nights out and through this made many friends in fairly high places. He did this part time while serving as an army officer’s errand boy. Perhaps as a result of mixing with the upper classes, Rann began to emulate gentlemen in his style of dress, and due to his fine clothes he was nicknamed ‘Sixteen-String Jack’.

Unfortunately his business folded because, along with purchasing high value clothes, he also frequented upper-class drinking establishments and soon ran into debt, to the tune of £50 (this was the equivalent to £4,335 in today’s money).[ii] In order to avoid the bailiffs, Rann turned pickpocket and soon fell in with two other young men engaged in the ‘profession’, known by the names of Jones, Clayton, and Colledge, who encouraged Rann to stick to this new way of life. Contemporary biographers record that his descent into a criminal course of life was also abetted by his budding relationship with a sex worker named Miss Roche.

With his friends, Rann commenced a series of robberies throughout London. He liked to live dangerously: he would taunt the Bow Street Runners, London’s first police force, by leading them on a chase throughout London and then giving them the slip. He also did not try to hide his identity: at one point, so his biography records, Rann was being hunted by John Fielding’s runners when he arrived at a turnpike and told the toll keeper:

“I am Sixteen-String Jack, the famous highwayman – have any of Sir John Fielding’s people been this way?”

“Yes,” said the man, “some of them are but just gone through.”

Rann replied, “If you see them again tell them I am gone towards London.”

And then he rode off with the most unconcern.[iii]

He was actually arrested three times in the last four years of his life on multiple counts of highway robbery. Yet none of the prosecutors could ever make the charges stick due to lack of evidence.

20180423_161137
Jack Rann at the Old Bailey

However, his downfall came when he robbed Dr William Bell, who was the chaplain to Princess Amelia (1783–1810) while he was travelling on Uxbridge Road. Rann was reportedly most uncivil about the whole affair:

Rann crossed the head of [Bell’s] horse and, demanding his money, said, “Give it to me and take no notice, or I’ll blow your brains out.”

The doctor, not wanting to test Rann’s threat, gave him 1s 6d as well as a tortoise-shell watch.[iv] Rann and his fellow robbers needed to get rid of their stolen goods, however, and on the same day as the robbery Miss Roche visited a pawn-brokers in order to exchange it for money. The pawnbroker assumed that the watch had not been acquired honestly, and so quietly alerted the authorities. Runners were sent to watch Roche’s apartment and the instant that Rann and his pals approached they were all arrested.

Rann’s accomplice, Clayton, was acquitted on all charges (accounts do not say why although it may due to the fact that he turned king’s evidence). Roche was sentenced to transportation to New South Wales for fourteen years. Rann himself was sentenced to be hanged. While he was understandably dismayed at the sentence, he did not let this put him off from enjoying his last few days in gaol. While confined in Newgate prison he entertained several ladies with food and drink. He was finally put to death on 30 November 1774, one of the 35,000 people who suffered under the harsh penal laws in place between 1770 and 1830.[v] Rann’s biographer actually regretted the harsh sentence that was passed upon him:

As in the course of these memoirs we have had occasion to draw a parallel between the offences of Sixtreen-String Jack and the accumulated guilt of others, we cannot help observing, that though his charges are many, yet compared with those of a blacker dye, who have received mercy, we cannot help wishing, that this once happy young man might receive some proportion of that heaven-like attribute, and be endowed with grace sufficient to become a useful member of society.[vi]

What was the point, argues the author, of executing a young man when others had committed worse crimes and gotten away with them? Would it not be more useful to society as a whole if this enterprising young man was pardoned and given the opportunity to turn his hands to a useful trade? It is during the late eighteenth century that concerns gradually began to be raised in some quarters about the efficacy of the death penalty, although they were very much in the minority and, of course, Britain did not abolish it until the 1960s.

While earlier criminals such as Maclaine and Sheppard were celebrated in the press, Rann merely cut a rather ridiculous figure. The general public had grown tired of highwaymen after the 1760s. Newspapers had taken over the reporting of crime from the criminal biographies and pamphlets of individual criminals’ lives that had flourished in the earlier part of the century. They often reported crime in a matter of fact way, and instead of providing lengthy justifications for criminals’ actions, endeavoured instead to emphasise the suffering of the victim in accounts of crime. Lincoln B. Faller also argues that a middle-class consciousness seeped into popular crime literature, and the middle classes, who at this time were wanting to differentiate themselves both from the aristocracy and the plebeian classes, actively disowned any identification that they might have had with such low lives. And it was, after all, the middle classes whom highwaymen robbed the most.[vii]

While heavily fictionalised stories of some highwaymen such as Sheppard and Turpin remained popular into the Victorian period, being featured in novels and penny dreadfuls, poor Jack Rann, who really wanted to be classed alongside the ‘great’ highwaymen of old, was easily forgotten.

[i] This account is based upon readings from the following sources: The Annals of Newgate; or, Malefactors’ Register, 4 vols (London: J. Wenman, 1776); Andrew Knapp and William Bawldwin, The Newgate Calendar; or, The Malefactors’ Bloody Register, 4 vols (London: J. Robins, 1824); A Genuine Account of the Life of John Rann, alias Sixteen-string Jack (London: Bailey, 1774); The Malefactor’s Register; or, the Newgate and Tyburn Calendar, 5 vols (London: A. Hogg, 1779).

[ii] See National Archives’ Currency Converter <http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter> [Accessed 23 April 2018].

[iii] Knapp and Bawldwin, The Newgate Calendar, 3: 2.

[iv] Ibid., p. 4.

[v] For statistics see V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)

[vi] A Genuine Account of the Life of John Rann, p. 4.

[vii] Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 191-93.

Advertisements

Criminality and Animal Cruelty in 18th-Century England

SBLeave a comment

I am currently in the final stages of editing a book chapter I have written for Prof. Alexander Kaufman’s and Penny Vlagopoulos’s forthcoming work entitled Food and Feasting in Post-1700 Outlaw Narratives (2018). My own contribution focuses upon butchers who turned to highway robbery in the eighteenth century. While the feedback I received from the editors was generally positive (I’ve never yet managed to produce the ‘perfect’ work which can be published ‘as is’ – maybe one day!), the editors felt I had let myself get side-tracked in the essay by veering a little too much into views of animal cruelty and its connection to criminality in the eighteenth century. Thus, I present here my book chapter off-cut as I saw no reason to discard it altogether.

During the eighteenth century, moralists assumed that the seeds of a person’s criminal inclinations could be discerned through their treatment of animals. Their reasoning was that, if a person could torture and harm a defenceless creature when they were young, then this could potentially translate into homicidal tendencies when they were older. Throughout the period, then, a number of contemporary literary and artistic works drew attention to this idea.

One of the first examples of a youthful rogue torturing an animal is found in Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665). This was a fictional biography of a criminal called Meriton Latroon which drew upon contemporary accounts of highwaymen and thieves for inspiration. At the beginning of the book, the protagonist, Meriton Latroon, tells the reader the following situation that occurred in his youth:

Thus happen’d, my father kept commonly many turkeys; one among the rest could not endure a fight with a red coat, which I usually wore. But that which most of all exasperated my budding passion, was, his assaulting my bread and butter, and instead thereof, sometimes my hands; which caused my bloomy revenge to use this stratagem: I enticed him with a piece of custard (which I temptingly shewed him), not without some suspition of danger which fear suggested, might attend my treachery, and so led me to the orchard gate, which was made to shut with a pulley; he reaching in his head after me, I immediately clapt fast the gate, and so surprized my mortal foe: Then did I use that little strength I had, to beat his brains out with my cat-stick; which being done, I deplum’d his tayl, sticking those feathers in my bonnet, as the insulting trophies of my first and latest conquest. Such then was my pride, as I nothing but gazed up at them; which so tryed the weakness of mine eyes and so strain’d the optick nerves, that they ran a tilt at one another, as if they contended to share with me in my victory.[1]

Meriton takes pleasure in his cruelty: he finds the turkey annoying, and resolves to rid himself of this “mortal foe”; he does not, however, humanely dispatch the poor animal but smashes his head in the gate, and the fact that he strains his optic nerve reveals that he whips himself up into a frenzy while beating the poor thing.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Perhaps the most memorable association between animal cruelty and criminality from the eighteenth century, however, is found in William Hogarth’s series of images entitled The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751).[i] The first in the series, The First Stage of Cruelty, depicts a group of children and bystanders enjoying the sight of a dog mauling a cat. Elsewhere in the illustration, two cats are hanged by their tales from a street sign, and two other adolescents are sticking an arrow into a dog’s rectum, while a poor bird is being blinded by with a red hot poker in her eye by two other youths. The inscription underneath the image laments the bloodthirstiness of London’s youth:

While various scenes of sportive woe

The infant race employ,

And tortur’d victims bleeding shew

The tyrant in the boy.

Behold! A Youth of gentler heart,

To spare the creature’s pain

O take, he cries – take all my tart,

But tears and tart are vain.

Learn from this fair example – You

Whom savage sports delight,

How cruelty disgusts the view

While pity charms the sight.[ii]

In order to cement the relationship between animal cruelty and criminality, Hogarth depicts a street artist drawing the instigator of this horrid event, young Tom Nero, being hanged on the gallows. Throughout the succeeding illustrations, Nero progresses through life committing various cruel acts until finally, he murders somebody. He is executed for this act, and in the final instalment, The Reward of Cruelty, his body is laid upon the surgeon’s table being dissected.[iii] Perhaps to avenge the cruel treatment of his fellow canines in the earlier image, a dog can be seen eating Nero’s heart that has fallen to the ground.

Not long after Hogarth published his series of prints, a highwayman named William Harrow (d. 1763) was executed at Tyburn. His biography, as recorded in Remarkable Trials and Interesting Memoirs of the Most Noted Criminals (1765), points out that he took great delight in cockfighting.[iv] Another biography published in The Malefactors’ Register; or, The Newgate and Tyburn Calendar (1779) similarly emphasises this fact.[v] Andrew Knapp and William Baldwin’s New Newgate Calendar (1825) focuses in greater detail on the acts of animal cruelty that Harrow committed while he was a youth:

This malefactor may be said to have galloped to his fate over the beaten road. He commenced his career in idleness, the parent [of] vice; then he became dexterous at throwing cocks, and cock-fighting. These cruel and infamous acquirements lead to robberies, adultery, and every other deadly sin. Such is the general course of highwaymen; and their goal – the gallows.[vi]

A footnote which Knapp and Baldwin include here is most interesting:

Kind treatment of animals, made for man’s use, is a sign of a humane and excellent disposition; so cruelty and barbarity to them, shews a wicked and diabolical temper. Do not these creatures, when they are bruised and wounded, shew an equal sense of pain with ourselves? Are not their shrieks and mournful cries, as so many, calls upon their tormentors for pity? And do not their dying pangs, and the painful convulsions of their tortured bodies, cause uneasiness in every human spectator?[vii]

By Knapp and Baldwin’s time, of course, attitudes towards animal cruelty were changing. The episode of animal cruelty was stated rather matter-of-factly by Richard Head in the seventeenth century, and not necessarily condemned. It was later lamented by Hogarth in the 1750s, although he did not offer any solution to the problem of youthful animal cruelty other than to warn them that they would end up at the gallows.

Nevertheless, some groups did take action during this century. As a result of campaigns by evangelicals during the late eighteenth century, a variety of blood sports had actually been outlawed by the nineteenth century and laws were eventually passed which aimed to put a stop to animal cruelty. In the same year that the aforementioned Knapp and Baldwin published their Newgate Calendar, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was founded (later the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or RSPCA).

References

[1]      Richard Head, The English Rogue Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon (London: H. Marsh, 1665), pp. 16-17.

[i]       For further information on animal cruelty and barbarism in Hogarth’s images see James A. Steintrager, ‘Monstrous Appearances: Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty and the Paradox of Inhumanity’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 42: 1 (2001), 59-82.

[ii]      William Hogarth, The Four Stages of Cruelty: The First Stage of Cruelty (London: [n. pub.], 1751).

[iii]     The Murder Act of 1751 stipulated that condemned felons’ bodies had to be given over to medical science.

[iv]     Anon. Remarkable Trials and Interesting Memoirs of the Most Noted Criminals Who Have Been Convicted at the Assizes, 2 Vols. (London: W. Nicoll, 1765), 2: 349.

[v]      Anon., The Malefactors’ Register; or, The Newgate and Tyburn Calendar, 5 Vols (London: A. Hogg, 1774), 4: 245.

[vi]     Andrew Knapp & William Baldwin, The New Newgate Calendar; Being Interesting Memoirs of Notorious Characters, Who Have Been Convicted of Outrages on The Laws of England During the Seventeenth Century, Brought Down to Present Times, 5 Vols. (London: J. & J. Cundee, [n. d.]), 3: 151.

[vii]     Ibid.

‘The Prince of Pick-Pockets’: George Barrington (1755-1804)

SB2 Comments

George Waldron, alias Barrington, was born into a poor family at Maynooth, County Kildare, Ireland. Although destitute, his mother and father made sure to learn that he could read and write. Because of his rudimentary education, he attracted the attention of the local doctor, who privately tutored him in mathematics, geography, and grammar. The young George Barrington made great progress, and the local bishop paid for him to go to the grammar school at Dublin.[i]

20170511_181746
A “True” Likeness of George Barrington, Esq. From The Criminal Recorder, Vol. 1 (1804). Author’s Collection.

But from a young age, it seems, Barrington, always had a propensity to commit acts of violence. While at school, he stabbed one of his schoolmates with a pen-knife. The wound was not fatal, luckily for the other boy, and Barrington was flogged for the assault. He resented the punishment, and in May 1771, he stole a few pieces of gold from the school and absconded.

He set off on the Great North Road from Dublin until he came to Drogheda, where he stopped at inn. After having eaten a meal and gotten some rest at the inn, he got talking to a man named John Price, ‘an abandoned character’, according to Barrington’s biographer. Price was the manager of a company of travelling street performers. He invited Barrington to tour with them.

20170511_181947
Penny Dreadful Serialisation of Barrington’s Life (1863). Author’s Collection.

He turned out to be a pretty good actor, and apparently distinguished himself in the lead role of a play entitled Venice Preserved. But the successes were not to last, and soon the entire company of players fell on hard times. Having noted his acting skills, Price asked Barrington if he would use his talents to become a gentleman pickpocket, ‘by affecting the airs and importance of a gentleman of fashion’.

It seems, however, that he was not a very good pickpocket. He first attempted an aristocrat at the races in Carlow, but he was caught. However, the good-natured nobleman said that if he returned his property nothing more would be said about the matter. Barrington wisely agreed.

20170511_181855
Penny Dreadful serialisation of Barrington’s Life (1863). Author’s Collection.

Meantime, his former master, Mr. Price, had been arrested for forgery and was hanged. So Barrington decided it was best if he moved to England and tried his game there. He first travelled to Brighton where, in 1775, he ingratiated himself into polite society. During this time he robbed several of his high-born friends.

He then travelled to London where he became acquainted with a Mister Lowe, another pickpocket, and the two men became quite daring in their enterprises.

Barrington went to Court where the Queen’s birthday celebrations were being held. Dressed as a clergyman, and again ingratiating himself with all the nobility, managed to rob several pounds from various people, as well as a diamond. He then retired from the party without suspicion and sold his stolen goods to a Jewish fence.

Barrington next visited a Drury Lane theatre, and proceeded to play a game of cards with Count Orlow, the Russian ambassador. He robbed the Russian of a gold snuff box set with diamonds. But one of the count’s servants saw him and seized him. Hauled before the Magistrate of Westminster, Sir John Fielding, Barrington confessed all, whereupon he was sentenced. The Count declined to prosecute, however, and so the matter went away.

He soon returned to his old ‘profession’, however, and in the Spring of 1777, he was arrested and sent to the prison hulks for three years. Due to his good behaviour, he was released after only twelve months, and went straight back to thieving.

Only a few days after his release, he attended a sermon at St. Sepulchre’s Church, and attempted to rob a lady’s purse. But he was seen by Constable William Payne, and again taken before the magistrate. He was found guilty and probably would have been hanged had he not pleaded for mercy before the judge. The account of Barrington’s life in The Criminal Recorder (1804-09) records this purported speech, in which he blames his criminality on his poverty. Although given the many fictional confessions at the time, there is no way of knowing if Barrington ever actually said these words.

20170511_181809
Penny Dreadful serialisation of Barrington’s Life (1863). Author’s Collection.

The magistrate took his lengthy speech into consideration, and sentenced him to seven years’ transportation to Botany Bay (see my other post on transportee Charles Kinnaister). While there, he conducted himself in an admirable manner, but in the latter part of his life suffered from various mental health problems, and he died in 1804.

Barrington went on to enjoy a limited literary afterlife as the hero of a long-running serial in the penny dreadful version of The New Newgate Calendar. There are various stories of him robbing corrupt officials and decadent aristocrats. As all true outlaws should, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor. He is named in these serials as ‘The Prince of the Pickpockets’.

Like all eighteenth-century criminals who enjoyed a brief resurgence in Victorian literature, however, he soon fades from cultural memory. It seems that no historical thief can compete with Robin Hood.

References

[i] Information for this article taken from the following books: The Criminal Recorder; or, Biographical Sketches of Notorious Public Characters 4 Vols. (London: T. Hurst & D. Symonds, 1804-09), 1: 38-46; Camden Pelham, Esq. The Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar (London: T. Miles, 1887), pp. 363-369.

Unruly Apprentices

SB1 Comment

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many criminals recorded in works such as Alexander Smith’s History of the Highwaymen (1714), and Charles Johnson’s History of the Highwaymen (1734), as well as his Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals (1735) were said to have begun their criminal careers as unruly, or idle apprentices. The notorious Jack Sheppard (1702-1724) is said to have been apprenticed to a carpenter, but being of a wicked disposition fell out with his master, and began cohabiting with a prostitute, Edgeworth Bess, and thereafter commencing a criminal career.[i] Even when discussing Robin Hood, the authors cited above, in a complete break with the existing historical tradition, state that he was originally apprenticed to a butcher, but ‘being of a wicked, licentious inclination, he followed not his trade’.[ii] (Not a single Robin Hood text, from the medieval period to the eighteenth century, records the famous outlaw as having been a butcher, and eighteenth-century accounts are unusual in this respect).[iii] The figure of the idle apprentice received its most famous artistic representation in William Hogarth’s series of paintings entitled Industry and Idleness (1747).

1280px-William_Hogarth_-_Industry_and_Idleness,_Plate_1;_The_Fellow_'Prentices_at_their_Looms
The First Plate of Hogarth’s Industry and Idleness (1747). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

One of the reasons why the idea of the unruly apprentice became a worrying figure was because, by going against his master, the delinquent youth was effectively signalling his intention to revolt against, not only his employer, but also the state and divine providence, ‘the concept that invokes hierarchical orders which support eighteenth-century life from the arrangement of the Cosmos to the distribution of wealth among the social classes’.[iv] The noted critic, John Richetti, for example, argues that the idle, or the “revolted apprentice”, ‘embodied furtive and unnatural longings for disruptive revolt […striking out] against social and moral restraints, against any sort of control from an external source’.[v] Moreover, when a certain criminal is represented in literature as having shunned hard work in his youth and preferring to follow a life of crime, this trope allowed the reader to view the felon’s criminality as part of an enduring strain of wickedness in the boy’s moral character, which early signs were present when he was young.

There were several factors which could induce initially virtuous young apprentices to fall into a life of criminality. First among these was the apprentice masters who, it was reasoned by some writers at the time, often failed to act as a moral guide for the youngsters. Often it is the dissolute habits of masters themselves which were assumed to have an adverse effect upon the minds of impressionable youths. For example, The Criminal Recorder; or, Biographical Sketches of Notorious Public Characters (1804-10), says that,

The evil habits of masters are in a great degree the means of corrupting apprentices. No sooner does an apprentice advance towards the last year of his time, than he thinks it incumbent on him to follow the example of his master by learning to smoke. This accomplishment acquired (according to his conception), he is a fit associate for those who frequent public houses.[vi]

Visiting public houses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was not, and still is not, a marker of potential criminality of course, but the same writer goes on to argue that, although the master may visit respectable public houses, the apprentice, in order to avoid meeting with the master on a night out, must necessarily visit those places to which he knows that his master will not venture, namely, places of ill-repute where the apprentice ‘meets with depraved company’.[vii]

It is through frequenting such places of ill-repute that the youth first becomes ‘ensnared’.[viii] A major factor in apprentices’ fall from grace is when they first become acquainted with prostitutes in these low public houses, as The Criminal Recorder writes:

Having arrived at the age of puberty, and meeting with profligate females in those haunts of idleness, his passions become inflamed. The force of evil example overpowers him. He too becomes depraved – Money must be procured to supply his wants which are generated by depravity. Aided by the facilities held out by old iron shops, he pilfers from his master to supply those wants, or associates himself with thieves, whose acquaintance he made in the progress of his seduction.[ix]

It will be recalled that this is how the criminal career of Jack Sheppard began, through meeting a prostitute, at which point in his biography Daniel Defoe exclaims:

Now was laid the foundation of his ruin![x]

Sometimes thieves and prostitutes could collaborate together in robbing people to supply their wants, through a system known as the ‘buttock and file’. The woman would entice a respectable passer-by into a dark alley with the prospect of sex. Then her male partner would emerge out of the shadows, usually deal a blow to the gentleman, and rob him.

Yet the idea of the unruly apprentice who shunned hard work and became a criminal was very much a metropolitan idea. Fewer accounts of criminals from outside London record their having been apprentices initially. Much of this was down to the nightlife temptations that were on offer in the capital, which, combined with apprentices’ youth, could be a recipe for moral disaster. As the fictional Memoirs of George Barnwell (1817), based upon an earlier play entitled The London Merchant (1731), records:

The juvenile mind is constitutionally sanguine; and the imagination wanders into wild and fanciful expectations, before its exuberances have been repressed by reason, and its dangerous heat tempered by experience. In the critical season of youth, before prudence and judgement have assumed the sceptre in the bosom, fancy is too apt to “riot in pleasure,” and to revel in visionary delights, the offspring of its own ardour, and which, unless seasonable correctives are applied to keep them in check, may ultimately lead to practical excesses of the most unprincipled nature and dangerous tendency.[xi]

If not constantly on his guard, the unsuspecting apprentice could find himself drawn into the criminal underworld. The account of Robert Crouch, a footpad, in Johnson’s Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, tells the story of how he was initially apprenticed to a butcher in Newgate Market,

But as soon as he was out of it he addicted himself to gaming, drinking, and whoring, and all the other vices which are so natural to abandoned young fellows in low life.[xii]

And it was women, gaming, drinking, and crime that would, it was supposed, eventually lead the apprentice to the gallows, just as happens to Hogarth’s Idle Prentice at the end of his story. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), references, references ‘Marybone and the Chocolate Houses’ as being the ‘undoing’ of the highwayman, Captain Macheath.[xiii]

Barnwell
Frontispiece to The Memoirs of George Barnwell (1817). Author’s Collection.

Of course, this was the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and when it came to discussions of the luxuries and vices of the town in the public sphere, there was inevitably some class-based hypocrisy at play. The poorer classes might become criminal through indulging their passions at womanising, drinking, and gaming, but the sons of rich aristocrats, or rakes, which did the same, were rarely condemned as criminal. There are further comparisons to be made between the rake and the idle apprentice, one of them being the fact that neither could hold down a job, although of course the sons of the aristocracy had inherited wealth to fall back on. The image of the aristocratic rake is a recurring one throughout the eighteenth century. For example, in issue two of Joseph Addison’s Spectator magazine, one of the members of the fictional coffeehouse club is Will honeycomb, a man who is

Very ready at that sort of Discourse with which Men usually entertain Women. He has all his Life dressed very well, and remembers Habits as others do Men. He can smile when one speaks to him, and laughs easily. He knows the History of every Mode, and can inform you from which of the French King’s Wenches our Wives and Daughters had this Manner of curling their Hair, that Way of placing their Hoods; whose Frailty was covered by such a Sort of Petticoat, and whose Vanity to show her Foot made that Part of the Dress so short in such a Year. In a Word, all his Conversation and Knowledge has been in the female World.[xiv]

In his memoirs, William Hickey (1749-1830) records how he partook of the entertainment of the town, debauching one or two young maidens in the process.[xv] Generally seen as a bit of a cad, this type of man pursued the same pleasures of the town as the idle apprentice, but of course he was not condemned for it.

So what could be done to turn the unsuspecting eighteenth-century apprentice away from a life of crime, and inculcate respect for virtue, religion, and authority? One of the reasons that so many criminal accounts appeared in the eighteenth century is because, at a time of great public concern about the apparently ever-rising crime wave, they were intended as moralist texts. A person was supposed to read the account of the criminal and take lessons from his life. As Johnson in the preface to Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals states,

My intention in communicating to the public the lives of those who, for about a dozen years past have been victims to their own crimes, is to continue to posterity the good effects of such examples, and by a recital of their vices to warn those who become my readers from ever engaging in those paths which necessarily have so fatal an end.[xvi]

Other solutions proposed by the author of The Criminal Recorder include stopping all apprentices’ wages, and making the apprentices entirely dependent upon their masters for food, drink, and lodging. To do otherwise is to ensure that the apprentice falls into a life of crime.[xvii]

Around the beginning of the nineteenth century, as the industrial revolution continued, the number of apprenticeships drastically declined. But instead of the unruly apprentice, public fears towards the emerging idea of the juvenile criminal. From the 1830s onwards, it would be figures such as the Artful Dodger and the Wild Boys of London, homeless pickpockets with no master, and eventually the hooligan from the late nineteenth century, that would be society’s cause for concern.

References

Header Image: Illustration of Jack Sheppard from The Criminal Recorder 4 Vols. (London: Cundee, 1804-10). Author’s Collection.

[i] Daniel Defoe, ‘The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard’ in Defoe on Sheppard and Wild, edited by Richard Holmes (London: Harper, 2004), p. 4.

[ii] Alexander Smith, A History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, edited by Arthur Heyward (London: Routledge, 1927), p. 408.

[iii] Stephen Basdeo, ‘Robin Hood the Brute: Representations of the Outlaw in Eighteenth-Century Criminal Biography’ Law, Crime and History 6: 2 (2016), pp. 54-70.

[iv] John Richetti, cited in Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Late-Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Criminal Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 45.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] The Criminal Recorder; or, Biographical Sketches of Notorious Public Characters 4 Vols. (London: Cundee, 1804-10), 3: 11.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] The Criminal Recorder, 3: 11-12.

[x] Defoe, ‘The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard’, p. 5.

[xi] The Memoirs of George Barnwell; the Unhappy Subject of Lillio’s Celebrated Tragedy (London: Sherwood, Neely & Jones, 1817), p. 7.

[xii] Charles Johnson, Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, edited by Arthur Heyward (London: Routledge, 1927), p. 439.

[xiii] John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera 3rd Edn. (London: J. Watts, 1729), p. 5.

[xiv] Joseph Addison, ‘Number Two’ in The Spectator, edited by Henry Morley (London: Routledge, 1891) [Internet <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12030/12030-h/12030-h/SV1/Spectator1> Accessed 9 April 2017].

[xv] William Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, edited by Roger Hudson (London: Folio Society, 1995), pp. 27-52.

[xvi] Johnson, Remarkable Criminals, p. 1.

[xvii] The Criminal Recorder, 3: 12-13.

Indicted for Publishing FAKE NEWS!!! The Trial of Alexander Scott

SBLeave a comment

Given that the term “fake news” has recently been bandied around by some very prominent public figures on social media (hurled as a term of abuse at various media outlets, and usually in capital letters), I thought I might bring to people’s attention an interesting little court case from June 1778.

On 23 April 1778, Mr. Alexander Scott, a bill poster was dutifully going about his job of sticking public proclamations to walls in one of the public marketplaces in London when he was stopped by a man who alleged that he came from the King’s Stationers and desired him to stick up some Bills. Scott was assured that he would be paid handsomely for it, and so he assented. The Bill read thus:

In Pursuance of his Majesty’s order in Council to me directed, these are to give public notice that war with France will be proclaimed on Friday next, the 24 instant, at the Palace Royal, St. James’s, at one of the clock [… Signed] D. M. Effingham.[i]

This was false news. The government was not intending to declare war on France.

At this news, the whole of London apparently became very alarmed, and the price of stocks and shares fell drastically. Scott, of course, simply carried on doing his job. After all, one did not refuse a commission from the Royal Printing House. So the next day more copies of this proclamation went up, causing further panic. Scott was observed sticking the proclamations up by two men from the Royal Exchange (the eighteenth-century equivalent of the stock market) named Richard Willis and Thomas Thorn. They instantly summoned a Constable and Scott was arrested and, rather dramatically, charged with High Treason (a crime which at that point still warranted the death penalty). The charge read that Alexander Scott did:

Unlawfully, wickedly, and maliciously, publish false news, whereby discord, or occasion of discord, might grow between our Lord the King and his people, or the great men of the realm, by publishing a certain printed paper, containing such false news.[ii]

The Bill had been supposedly signed by the Deputy Marshall of England, the Earl of Effingham, who was also summoned to the trial. Effingham declared that he certainly had known nothing about these bills, and that whoever put his name to them is guilty of forgery.

Luckily for Scott, nobody believed that he was the orchestrator of this falsehood. After having received the proclamations, he went to see his friend, Josiah Roe, who owned a public house. Roe’s witness statement records that:

Pulling out one of the bills, [Scott] said, “what do you think of the war now? I have bills to stick up; it is to be proclaimed on Friday.”[iii]

To which Mr Roe replied:

“Sure nobody has deceived you?”[iv]

But of course, Scott had received the papers from the King’s printer, had he not? Nobody would print such falsehoods. Luckily for Scott, the jury agreed, like most of the witnesses and even the arresting Constable, that Scott was just the innocent victim of a malicious prank.

References

[i] The New Newgate Calendar; or, the Malefactors’ Bloody Register 5 Vols. (London: A Hogg [n.d.]), 5: 284

[ii] The New Newgate Calendar; or, the Malefactors’ Bloody Register, p.284.

[iii] The New Newgate Calendar; or, the Malefactors’ Bloody Register, p.288

[iv] Ibid.

Charles Kinnaister: Executed for the Murder of Australian Aborigines (1838)

SB1 Comment

Broadly speaking, criminals fall into three types: heroes, buffoons, and brutes.[i] The categories are just as applicable to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they are today – ‘heroes’ would be men like Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber of 1963, buffoons would be the types of offender featured in television shows such as America’s Dumbest Criminals (1996-2000), while the ‘brutes’ would include people such as Geoffrey Dahmer (1960-1994). This website usually deals with the criminal-as-hero types: outlaws and highwaymen whose crimes fall under the category of what Eric Hobsbawm calls ‘social banditry’,[ii] although I have featured the cannibal Sawney Beane whose story was inspiration behind the popular horror movie, The Hills Have Eyes (1977). It is about a set of brutes, or ‘monsters in human shape’,[iii] who were executed in nineteenth-century New South Wales that we turn our attention to today.[iv]

Outside of academia, the history of British colonialism is usually conceived of as one in which the colonisers – the British – committed atrocities against the indigenous population without any consequences. That the British were responsible for some ghastly humanitarian crimes during the time that they had an empire is certainly true, but the colonisers’ hands were not completely free to do as they pleased, as the execution of Charles Kinnaister and his men in 1838 for the murder of Australian aborigines illustrates.

cooks-map
Cook’s Map of the Coast of New South Wales and Botany Bay (1770)

A penal colony was established at New South Wales in 1788 following the “discovery” of the region in the 1770s by Capt. James Cook. Britain’s criminals, which previously had been shipped off to the Americas, as the eponymous title character of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), were now shipped off to Australia instead, a decision no doubt arrived at after the American colonies had declared their independence from Britain in 1783.

Charles Kinnaister, and his accomplices, William Hawkins, James Parry, Edward Foley, James Cates, John Russell, and John Johnson had all been transported in 1837. While transportation was designed to be a punishment, one of the ideas behind it was that some of the felons transported could serve as labourers for the local citizens, and thereby help to build up the colony. The men alluded to above were set to work as shepherds to a family of landowners in New South Wales.

One day, in the course of their duties, the men, along with one native free man called John Fleming (who, as Jillian Barnes notes, is usually left out of accounts of these murders)[v] rode beyond their masters’ lands and encountered a group of Australian aborigines. There were thirty of them in total. Kinnaister and his crew,

Tied them together with a rope, with the exception of one woman. This was done without a word being uttered, and with a cool and bloody determination. When all were thus secured, one end of the rope was tied around the body of the foremost of the murderers, who, having mounted his horse, led the way, dragging the terrified group after him, while his infamous companions guarded them on all sides.[vi]

The victims were dragged some distance and were then butchered with knives and swords,

‘Till all lay a lifeless mass, in death clinging to each other in the throes of natural affection’.[vii]

The murderers attempted to conceal their crimes as best they could by setting alight to the bodies. But after the fire died down, fragments of bones remained.

A professional police force in Britain had only been recently established in 1829, and the detective agency would not be established until 1842. Needless to say, policing and detection in the colonies was oftenn less efficient than it was in Britain. At this time period, Europeans still believed that God directly intervened in the detection and punishment of murderers. It is a belief expressed in the account of this crime in The Chronicles of Crime (1841); despite the men’s attempts to conceal their foul deeds,

The vengeance of providence was not to be thus thwarted; and although for a time these miscreants imagined they had effectually disguised their horrible work, circumstances led to their detection and apprehension.[viii]

It was birds that brought about these men’s arrest. After the murders, birds of prey were seen circling the place where the outrage had been committed. Some stock-men went to investigate and found the half-burnt carcases. Kinnaister and his accomplices were immediately suspected, owing to their past conduct, and upon examination the men admitted everything they had done.

The most ‘whole’ body that was left unburnt by the men was that of an indigenous man named ‘Daddy’. So it was for his murder that the men were indicted for. The next part of the story is where the racial prejudice in the minds of some of the colonialists becomes most apparent. Despite Kinnaister’s and his men’s admission of guilt, and the strong circumstantial evidence against them, an association was formed by some of the rich colonists to get the men acquitted. The best legal counsel was hired, and the defence lawyers argued that the murders were necessary because

They had been formed with the ostensible project of preserving the property of the settlers from the incursions of the [natives].[ix]

The defence convinced the jury, who found the men Not Guilty. It was a case of blatant racial prejudice, something which was acknowledged at the time. Camden Pelham, who recorded this event a few years later in The Chronicles of Crime, expresses his regret and shame that racial prejudices contributed to the acquittal.[x]

The prosecution did not rest, however, and two months later arraigned the men again, and this time they were justly found Guilty by the jury. The vile criminals were then hanged on 15 December 1838.

References

Header Image: Kinnaister and his Accomplices Murder the Aborigines. From Camden Pelham, The Chronicles of Crime (London, 1887), p.473.

[i] Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p.54.

[ii] Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (London: Pelican, 1969).

[iii] Camden Palham, The Chronicles of Crime; or, The New Newgate Calendar. Being a Series of Memoirs and Anecdotes of Notorious Characters who have Outraged the Laws of Great Britain from the Earliest Period to 1841 (London: T. Tegg, 1841; repr. London: T. Miles, 1887), p.472.

[iv] Scholarship on this case includes the following articles: Patsy Withycombe & Jillian Barnes, ‘Representation and Power: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words – “Australian Aborigines Slaughtered by Convicts” 1841’ Journal of Australian Indigenous Issues 18: 2 (2015), pp.62-67.

[v] Barnes, ‘Representation and Power’, p.67.

[vi] Pelham, Chronicles of Crime, p.473.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.