Tag: crime fiction

Blind Justice in Eugene Sue’s “The Mysteries of Paris” (1842–3)

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By Stephen Basdeo

In the 19 June 1842, issue of the Parisian magazine, Journal des Debats, a new serialised novel appeared entitled The Mysteries of Paris, which ran weekly until 15 October 1843.

The novel was written by Eugene Sue (1804-57), and the plot concerns a man called Rodolphe who moves through the Parisian underworld doing good works, such as saving young girls from procuresses (women who would pimp other women out). In time, it turns out that Rodolphe is actually a very rich man, and heir to a German dukedom.

The plot was inspired by his political beliefs, for Sue was a socialist, and his rendering of the desperate plight of the Parisian underclasses was intended to inspire sympathy among for them amongst his affluent readers. This is perhaps why E. R. Tennenbaum sees in Sue’s novel the first glimmers of what he calls ‘bleeding heart liberalism’. In addition to having written some fairly successful novels, he took part in the French Revolution of 1848, after which time he was elected to the Parisian Legislative Assembly, however, with Napoleon III’s coup d’etat, he was exiled to Savoy and spent the rest of his days there.[1]

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Title page to Eugene Sue’s “Mysteries of Paris” (c) Stephen Basdeo

Richard Maxwell argues that The Mysteries of Paris, along with The Mysteries of London (1845) which it inspired, represented a new genre of fiction: the urban gothic. In these novels the modern industrial city provided the setting for a gothic romance, in contrast to the rural gothic settings of writers such as Matthew Lewis and William Harrison Ainsworth. The City is portrayed in these “City Mysteries” as a maze where all manner of vice and crime exist, from fashionable high class residences to the slum districts.[2]

The novel appears to have been well received amongst readers of all classes; and of course G. W. M. Reynolds was quite taken with it, seeing as he produced his own The Mysteries of London, and Sue’s novel was also translated into English as a penny blood, or penny dreadful, and went through several editions. In fact, Sue’s serial kicked off a whole ‘City Mysteries’ genre such as the aforementioned Mysteries of London by G. W. M. Reynolds; The Mysteries of Lisbon by Camilo Branco; The Slums of St. Petersburg by Vsevolod Krestovsky; and The Mysteries of New York by Ned Buntline.

It should not be supposed that Sue’s novel, in contrast to many penny serials at this time, was aimed at children (penny dreadfuls typically featured boy thieves and highwaymen from the eighteenth century). Instead this is a serial which was read by adults, and it would be only in the latter part of the 1800s that penny serials would become targeted specifically towards young readers.

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Illustration from Eugene Sue’s “Mysteries of Paris” (c) Stephen Basdeo

Indeed, some of the scenes in the novel are so horrific that, had the novel been one for children, they would have had nightmares.

In the early part of the book, Rodolphe encounters a master criminal who goes by the name of the Schoolmaster. Drawing upon contemporary studies of physiognomy, Sue makes it clear that this man has criminality etched into his appearance. He is guilty of all manner of crimes such as murder, kidnapping, extortion. Yet the Schoolmaster finally receives his comeuppance when he makes an attempt upon the life of Rodolphe and his friend, but ultimately fails.

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The menacing Schoolmaster. Illustration from Sue’s “Mysteries of Paris” (c) Stephen Basdeo

The Schoolmaster is captured, bound to a chair tightly with rope, and taken into Rodolphe’s drawing room where Rodolphe, his Doctor, and his servant are set around a table. An interrogation of the Schoolmaster follows and Rodolphe has to decide what to do with him.

Sue was highly critical of the French justice system, for it seemed to him, and indeed many reformers of the time, to be ineffective at actually punishing criminals and simply allowed them to refine their criminal talents in concert with other reprobates. And neither was simply turning him over to be guillotined going to be any good:

“If on the other hand, you had braved the scaffold – as one having the murderer’s only redeeming quality, personal courage – equally little would it have availed with me to have given you up to the executioner. For you, the scaffold would be merely an ensanguined stage; where, like so many others, you would make a parade of your ferocity; where, reckless of a miserable life, you would exhale your last breath with a blasphemy … It is not good for the people to see the criminal cracking jokes with the executioner, breathing out in a sneer … All crime may be expiated and redeemed, says the Saviour; but to that end, sincere repentance is necessary. From the tribunal to the scaffold, the journey is too short; it would not do, therefore, for you to die thus.”[3]

So what was to be done? Rodolphe begins to speak every more cryptically:

“You have criminally abused your strength – I will paralyse that strength; the strongest have trembled before you – you shall tremble before the weakest. Assassin! You have plunged the creatures of God into eternal night – the shadows of night eternal shall commence for you even in this world. This night – in a few minutes – your punishment shall equal your offences. But … the punishment I am about to pronounce leaves you a boundless horizon of repentance … I forever deprive you of all the splendours of creation … Yes! For ever isolated from the external world you will be forced to look constantly within yourself.[4]

Rodolphe does say, however, that he will be provided for financially and places in the Schoolmaster’s waistcoat 3,000 francs.

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The punishment of the Schoolmaster. Illustration from Eugene Sue’s “Mysteries of Paris” (c) Stephen Basdeo

At this point, the schoolmaster is tied to a chair so tightly that he cannot move an inch, and the doctor arises and wheels him out of the room momentarily. All is silent, and Rodolphe’s servant, the Chourineur, has no idea what is transpiring in the next room. And then the Schoolmaster is brought back in:

“Blind! Blind! Blind!” cried the brigand, in an increasing tone of agony.

“You are free – you have money – go!”

“But – I cannot go! How would you have me go? I cannot see! Oh it is a frightful crime thus to abuse your strength, in order to–”

“It is a crime to abuse one’s strength,” said Rodolphe, in his most solemn tones. “And then, what hast thou done with thy strength?”

“Oh death! Yes, I should have preferred death!” cried the schoolmaster, “to be at everyone’s mercy, to be afraid of everything! Ah! A mere child can beat me now! What, oh! What shall I do? My God! My God! What shall I do?”

“You have money.”

“I shall be robbed.”

“You will be robbed! Do you understand these words which you pronounce with so much terror? Do you understand them – you, who have robbed so many? Go.”[5]

Rodolphe is not totally unfeeling, however, and he commands his servant to ensure that the Schoolmaster is cared for by being given a place to stay the night, and he is subsequently placed in the care of an honest and respectable family who live in a rural part of France.

As a punishment, blinding stopped being used as a punishment for crimes in Britain and France during the early modern period, and even then, it was not used that much. Its heyday as a punishment in England was during the Anglo-Saxon period, when, along with castration, it served as a punishment for counterfeiters.[6] By the time that Sue was writing, it would have been regarded in both countries as a barbaric punishment.

While Tennebaum argued that Sue’s novel represented the beginnings of “bleeding heart liberalism”, Eugene Sue, in spite of his alleged socialist beliefs, was hardly a kind man when it came to the wrongs and crimes of the poor, or those whom he viewed as irredeemably criminal. When he was elected to the French Legislative Assembly, in fact, while he declared his opposition to capital punishment, he did advocate blinding as a means of reforming criminals, or at the very least, placing them in solitary confinement perpetually. In the novel, Sue’s Grand Duke Rodolphe views the righting of the wrongs and crimes of the poor as his aristocratic responsibility; he has much sympathy with the ‘respectable’ poor (those who conformed to the bourgeoisie’s expectations of how they should act: deferential and working for a pittance with murmuring only very little), but he also accepts that there are some members of the poor who stand little chance of being reformed unless they are taken out of society. As Karl Marx and Frederich Engels pointed out in their commentary on the novel in The Holy Family (1844), Sue’s Rodolphe simply wants to remove from society all who do not conform to his world view.[7]

In the end, the blinding that the Schoolmaster receives does not induce him to mend his ways but instead he broods on his punishment, and vows vengeance upon Rodolphe for the rest of his life…

[1] See E. R. Tennenbaum, ‘The Beginnings of Bleeding-Heart Liberalism: Eugene Sue’s les Mysteres de Paris’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23: 3 (1981), 491-507.

[2] See Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993).

[3] Eugene Sue, The Mysteries of Paris (London: Boscoe’s Library, 1843), p. 52.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., p. 53.

[6] Alyxandra Mattison, ‘The Execution and Burial of Criminals in Early Medieval England, c. 850-1150: An Examination of Changes in Judicial Punishment Across the Norman Conquest’ (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sheffield, 2016), p. 40.

[7] Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Holy Family; or Critique of Critical Criticism, Trans. Richard Dixon (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956) https://www.marxists.org [Accessed 26 July 2018]

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Jack ‘Sixteen-String’ Rann (1750–74)

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

Mack the Knife: The “True” Story Behind the Song

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The popular song Mack the Knife was based upon the story of an eighteenth-century highwayman named Captain Macheath. This post traces the literary life of this fictional character.

Most people, at some point in their lives, will have heard the song Mack the Knife, which has been covered by a wide range of singers including Louis Armstrong (1901–71), my personal favourite, Bobby Darin (1936–73), Frank Sinatra (1915–98), and Roger Daltrey (1944–). Few people will realise, however, that the song is based upon the story of a fictional eighteenth-century highwayman named Captain Macheath, who first appeared in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1727) and whose story was subsequently reimagined in Bertold Brecht’s The Three-Penny Opera (1928).

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John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728)

Gay’s opera was essentially the first ‘jukebox musical’: it took the tunes of contemporary popular folk songs, changed their lyrics, and inserted them into the narrative. It tells the story of a womanising highwayman, Macheath, based upon the real-life thief, Jack Sheppard (1702–24), who has a romance with the daughter of the thief taker, Peachum. The latter is a character based upon Sheppard’s nemesis, Jonathan Wild (c. 1688–1725). As thief taker, Peachum controls all the crime in London in his capacity as the main law-enforcer, and has the power of life and death over his criminals. He takes exception to the proposed marriage between Macheath and his daughter and resolves to have him hanged. What follows is a comical tale of encounters with sex workers, escapes from gaol, until finally he is taken to be hanged. Instead of being hanged, however, the playwright steps on to the stage and proclaims a reprieve at the last moment, saving the heroic highwayman from the gallows.

The play did much to cement the image of the heroic highwayman in public consciousness with contemporary audiences, which built upon previous portrayals of some robbers as noble and generous in criminal biographies such as Alexander Smith’s History of the Highwaymen (1714) and Charles Johnson’s History of the Highwaymen (1734).[i] In turn, later highwaymen such as James Maclaine (1724–50) fashioned themselves as modern-day Macheaths in order to curry favour with the public. In his play, Gay had a wider point to make, however: he wanted to criticise the government; the leading ministers of state were no better than the corrupt thief takers who patrolled London’s streets and who, while they prosecuted certain small-scale, petty criminals, left larger crimes unpunished. Thus we see Peachum in the opening scene of The Beggar’s Opera singing:

Through all the employments of life

Each neighbour abuses his brother;

Whore and rogue they call husband and wife,

All professions be-rogue one another.

The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,

The lawyer beknaves the Divine,

And the statesman because he’s so great,

Thinks his trade as honest as mine.[ii]

He then proceeds to say

A lawyer is an honest employment, so is mine. Like me too he acts in a double capacity, both against rogues and for ‘em; for ‘tis fitting that we should protect and encourage cheats, since we live by ‘em.[iii]

A particular target of Gay’s attacks in The Beggar’s Opera was the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). Widely viewed as corrupt, even though nobody ever managed to trace any particular frauds or embezzlements to him, to satirists in the eighteenth century he represented all that was wrong with the ruling aristocratic oligarchy.

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(Portrayals of Captain Macheath/Mack the Knife through the Ages)

During the Victorian period, with the rise of the penny dreadful publishing industry, tales of highwaymen became immensely popular with both adults and youths of the lower middle and working classes. Dick Turpin (1705–39) appeared regularly in the columns of these cheap magazines, as did older highwaymen such as Robin Hood and the afore-mentioned Jack Sheppard. The actual stories differed little from other contemporary tales of highwaymen, being mostly full of daring adventures, escapes from the police, and the rescue of young maidens from aristocratic villains. Pierce Egan (1814–80), an author about whom I have written a lot on this website, authored Captain Macheath: The Highwayman of a Century Since (1840). Later anonymously-written penny dreadfuls include a long running serial in the magazine Tales of Highwaymen (1865–66), as well as Captain Macheath: The Prince of the Highway (1892), which is a virtual plagiarism of Egan’s earlier novel.

The song Mack the Knife does not appear in Gay’s opera, but appeared Brecht’s Three-Penny Opera. While in Gay’s earlier play, Macheath is a jovial and relatively good-natured fellow who flinches from using violence, Brecht gives us a Macheath, or a ‘Mack the Knife’ who, it is hinted, has a darker side to his character. This comes through most clearly in the song entitled Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, sung usually at the beginning of the play, which is the song we all know as Mack the Knife:

Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear

And it shows them pearly white

But the knife that Macheath carries,

No one knows where it may be.[iv]

The song then gives us a litany of some of the quite brutal crimes attributed to Macheath/Mack the Knife:

On a blue and blamy Sunday

On the Strand a man  has lost his life.

A man darts around the corner,

People call him Mack the Knife.

 

And Schmul Meier is still missing,

One more wealthy man removed,

Somehow Mackie has his money,

Yet nothing can be proved.

 

Jenny Towler was discovered,

With a knife stuck in her chest,

Mackie strolls along the dockside,

Knows no more than all the rest.

 

Seven children and an old man,

Burned alive in old Soho

In the crowd stands Mack the Knife

Who’s not asked and doesn’t know.

 

And the widow not yet twenty

Only her name could she say,

Defiled one night as she lay sleeping

Mackie what price did you pay?[v]

Murder, arson, and rape: all of these crimes are attributed to Macheath; even though he is the hero of the tale, he is certainly not as noble and gentlemanly as the Macheath of Gay’s story. The story of the play is essentially the same as The Beggar’s Opera, although it is set in Victorian London instead of Georgian London as Gay’s play was: Mack the Knife marries Polly Peachum, to the chagrin of her father Peachum who is an underworld crime lord; in concert with the Chief of Police, Peachum convinces the policeman to gather enough evidence to hang Mack. Eventually Mack is arrested and is taken to be hanged, but at the last minute a pardon arrives from Queen Victoria for him. He is released and is soon elevated to a Baronetcy, the implication being that he can now steal from people legally because he is a member of the aristocracy. Through this means, Brecht, a socialist, offers a critique of the corruption endemic in the modern capitalist city in which thieves are no better than the elites, which is a similar argument to that made by Gay almost two centuries before.

Later singers, such as the ones I pointed out in the introduction, adapted Brecht’s Moritat and gave it the title of Mack the Knife. We see a slight return in these later songs to a friendlier portrayal of Macheath, such as that contained in the Bobby Darin lyrics:

Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear

And it shows them pearly white

Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe

And he keeps it, ah, out of sight.

Ya know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe

Scarlet billows start to spread

Fancy gloves, oh, wears old MacHeath, babe

So there’s never, never a trace of red.

Now on the sidewalk, huh, huh, whoo sunny morning, un huh

Lies a body just oozin’ life, eek

And someone’s sneakin’ ’round the corner

Could that someone be Mack the Knife?

 

There’s a tugboat, huh, huh, down by the river don’tcha know

Where a cement bag’s just a’drooppin’ on down

Oh, that cement is for, just for the weight, dear

Five’ll get ya ten old Macky’s back in town

Now d’ja hear ’bout Louie Miller? He disappeared, babe

After drawin’ out all his hard-earned cash

And now MacHeath spends just like a sailor

Could it be our boy’s done somethin’ rash?

 

Now Jenny Diver, ho, ho, yeah, Sukey Tawdry

Ooh, Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown

Oh, that line forms on the right, babe

Now that Macky’s back in town.

 

I said Jenny Diver, whoa, Sukey Tawdry

Look out to Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown

Yes, that line forms on the right, babe

Now that Macky’s back in town

Look out, old Macky’s back

It appears that there are still heavy penalties for those who cross his path, but at least he does not rape women or burn whole families alive in their houses.

For those interested in seeing original versions of The Three-Penny Opera, see the following youtuve videos:

And the Roger Daltrey version of the movie can be found here:

References

[i] For a detailed and scholarly discussion of highwaymen and masculinity see the following: Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates: The Making of the Modern Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). For further reading on The Beggar’s Opera (1728) see the following: Lucy Moore, The Thieves’ Opera (London: Penguin, 1997).

[ii] John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, 3rd Edn (London: J. Watts, 1729), p. 1.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Translated approximately from the original German.

[v] Bertolt Brecht, The Three-Penny Opera (1928).

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

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

When “Upperworld” and “Underworld” Meet: Social Class and Crime in “The Mysteries of London (1844-46)

SB7 Comments

[The following is the text of a talk given at Lancaster University’s ‘Class and the Past Conference’ on 16 March 2017].

Introduction

George William MacArthur Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London, serialised between 1844 and 1846, was the biggest-selling novel of the Victorian era. In recent years Reynolds’ life and work have received renewed critical attention from literary scholars, who have explored, as Stephen Carver does, Reynolds’ representation of the underworld.[i] The term ‘underworld’ is one that is often used by scholars, but usually without a full consideration of its meaning. For example, while many scholars speak of an underworld of organised crime, rarely do researchers account for the fact that an ‘upperworld’ must exist also, and that the criminal members of both worlds, or classes, collude together in order to cause harm to ‘the industrious classes’. Given that Reynolds sees society as being divided into three distinct classes: the aristocracy, the industrious classes, and the criminal classes, Reynolds’ depiction of organised crime challenged emerging Victorian stereotypes of a ‘criminal class’. Crime in The Mysteries of London is not merely a story of ‘the wrongs and crimes of the poor’; it is also a story of the wrongs and crimes of those in the ‘upperworld’, which of course suited Reynolds’ radical sentiments.

Reynolds’ Conception of Society

As stated above, Reynolds does not hold to the typical Victorian conception of society as being divided into upper class, middle class(es), and working classes. As we can see, there are several gradations in society: at the top, there is the monarchy and the aristocracy, an institution and a class of people for which Reynolds certainly had no high degree of admiration, and often complained about ‘the sickening specimens of grovelling and self-abasement’ some people displayed towards the monarchy.[ii] A flavour of his attitude towards the aristocracy is evident in his comments about the Duke of Newcastle, who according to Reynolds had ‘a mental capacity amounting almost to the idiotic’.[iii] The Duke of Cumberland’s obituary in Reynolds’ Newspaper said that he was ‘a monster in human shape, a veritable fiend without a single redeeming quality’ whose life amounted to a progression of ‘perjury, adultery, seduction, incest and murder’.[iv]

Reynoldsclass
Reynolds’ Idea of Victorian Class Structure

Towards the clergy and the Christian religion in general Reynolds likewise had no great regard. One of his earliest written works was a short pamphlet entitled The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed (1832). In this work he writes of how he became a deist, having concluded that ‘we find the Old and New Testament to be false’.[v] Of the nineteenth-century clergy he scathingly asks:

Who are more addicted to the luxuries and sensualities of life than the ministers of God?[vi]

The people who matter in society, according to Reynolds, are the middle classes and ‘the industrious classes’. The hero of The Mysteries of London, Richard Markham, is a member of the middle classes, as was Reynolds himself, in spite of his repeated bankruptcies. Reynolds deplored the condition of the working classes, whose problems he attributes to the upper classes:

The country that contains the greatest wealth of all the territories of the universe, is that which also knows the greatest amount of hideous, revolting, heart-rending misery. In England men and women die of starvation in the streets. In England women murder their children to save them from a lingering death by famine. In England the poor commit crimes to obtain an asylum in a gaol. In England aged females die by their own hands, in order to avoid the workhouse.[vii]

The condition of the working poor is set in contrast with the gluttony of the aristocracy who enjoy a life of plenty.[viii] But this is not to say that Reynolds views the poor as saints. In his opening chapter, he states that ‘crime is abundant in this great city’.[ix] And in the ensuing novel, he makes clear that many members of the poorer classes are indeed criminal. Nevertheless, Reynolds was popular with working people, especially Chartists.[x] And he certainly had nothing to gain by vehemently expressing his radical and republican sentiments in the press except the opprobrium of contemporaries such as Dickens, who wrote in 1849 that Reynolds’ name was ‘a name with which no lady’s, and no gentleman’s, should be associated’.[xi] While some might argue that Reynolds simply supported radical causes to curry favour with the working classes, as will be illustrated below, Reynolds was not writing solely for that class. Instead, Reynolds perhaps saw himself as the Republican activist in The Mysteries of London sees himself; he is a man who is

Represented as a character who ought to be loathed and shunned by all virtuous and honest people […] And yet, O God! […] I only strive to arouse the grovelling spirit of the industrious millions to a sense of the wrongs under which they labour, and to prove to them that they were not sent into this world to lick the dust beneath the feet of majesty and the aristocracy!”[xii]

It will be noted that he never attacks the middle classes here; he merely speaks of the ‘industrious millions’ as occupying a place beneath the feet ‘of majesty and the aristocracy’. Hence Reynolds’ merging of the middle classes and working classes looks back to earlier forms of nineteenth-century radicalism in which both classes formed an alliance to effect parliamentary reform before the ‘Great Betrayal’ of 1832.[xiii] Among the many readings of Reynolds’ radicalism, it is Gertrude Himmelfarb whose assessment seems most appropriate:

[Reynolds’] radicalism was of an entirely different order and because his idea of poverty was nihilistic rather than compassionate or heroic […] violence and depravity, licentiousness and criminality, were the only forms of existence, and potentially the only means of redemption, available to the poor.[xiv]

In essence, Reynolds’ depiction of criminality amongst the poorer classes is a literary representation of the fact that society gets the criminals that it deserves.

reynolds-2
The villains of The Mysteries of London in a low ale-house

Collaboration between Upperworld and Underworld

The principal underworld villains in the novel are the Resurrection Man, the Buffer, Dick Flairer and Bill Bolter. They are a tight-knit criminal gang who also have links to a wider network of criminals known as the Forty Thieves.[xv] Yet organised crime groups usually carry out their activities with the often tacit approval of those in the upperworld.[xvi] There is an instance in the novel which neatly illustrates the collusion between people from the two worlds: the Cracksman’s undertaking of a highway robbery.

Reynolds’ novel is essentially the story of two brothers, the virtuous Richard Markham and his not-so-virtuous brother, Eugene. Although Richard experiences some misfortunes throughout his life, he rises in society through his own virtue, and eventually marries into the family of an Italian nobleman. Eugene, on the other hand, also advances in society through means of corruption, fraud and embezzlement. He eventually becomes the MP for a place called Rottenborough, the naming of which is an allusion to pre-Reform Act constituencies such as Old Sarum. Eugene, who goes under the assumed name of Montague Greenwood, plots to defraud the good Count Alteroni of his fortune. However, he must first acquire a vital document from him. For this, Eugene must employ the services of the Cracksman and his fellows:

“What’s the natur’ of the service?” demanded the Cracksman, darting a keen and penetrating glance at Greenwood.

“A highway robbery,” coolly answered [Eugene …]

“All right!” cried the Cracksman. “Now what’s the robbery, and what’s the reward?”

[…]

“I will now explain to you what I want done. Between eleven and twelve o’clock a gentleman will leave London for Richmond. He will be in his own cabriolet, with a tiger, only twelve years old, behind. The cab is light blue – the wheels streaked with white. This is peculiar, and cannot be mistaken. The horse is a tall bay, with silver- mounted harness. This gentleman must be stopped; and everything his pockets contain – everything, mind – must be brought to me. Whatever money there may be about him shall be yours, and I will add fifty guineas to the amount: – but all that you find about his person, save the money, must be handed over to me.”[xvii]

Note the precision with which the robbery is to be carried out: clear and concise instructions are given; crime in the urban, industrial society is cold and calculated; it is organised crime. This is not the romantic highway robbery of the type carried out by William Harrison Ainsworth’s Dick Turpin in Rookwood (1834). Before the Cracksman commits the crime, he receives an ‘advance’ of twenty guineas, at which the Cracksman exclaims: ‘that’s business!’[xviii] The robbery is carried out, and at Eugene and the Cracksman’s second meeting the villains are paid in full for their work. The meeting is concluded with the Cracksman hoping ‘that he should have his custom in future’ (italics in original).[xix] To the villains of The Mysteries of London crime is a business carried out with the sole purpose of financial gain. Surgeons are their customers, or they make themselves available as henchmen-for-hire willing to do the dirty work of those in from supposedly more respectable stations in life as long as the price is right.

The Wrongs and Crimes of the Upperworld

Although the above serves as an example of collaboration between members of the upper world and the underworld, Reynolds shows that members from the supposedly respectable classes were capable of committing crime independently of their counterparts from criminal class. Eugene Markham, for instance, along with several MPs, a Lord, and the Sheriff of London are seen conspiring together to establish a fraudulent railway company at a dinner party held by Eugene for his fellow conspirators:

Algiers, Oran, and Morocco Great Desert Railway.

“(Provisionally Registered Pursuant to Act.)

“Capital £1,200,000, in 80,000 shares, of £20 each.

“Deposit £2 2s. per Share.

Committee of Direction: The Most Honourable Marquis of Holmesford, G. C. B. Chairman. – George Montague Greenwood, Esq. M.P. Deputy Chairman.[xx]

The conspirators require capital, but as Eugene assures those assembled at his dinner party, no such railway scheme exists, and it has only been devised solely for defrauding investors:

And now, my lord and gentlemen, we perfectly understand each other. Each takes as many shares as he pleases. When they reach a high premium, each may sell as he thinks fit. Then, when we have realized our profits, we will inform the shareholders that insuperable difficulties prevent the carrying out of the project,- that Abd-el-Kadir, for instance, has violated his agreement and declared against the scheme,- that the Committee of Direction will, therefore, retain a sum sufficient to defray the expenses already incurred, and that the remaining capital paid up shall be returned to the shareholders.[xxi]

This is an example of what might now be termed ‘white collar crime’ and reflects the ‘Railway Mania’ of 1846-47, occurring at precisely the time when Reynolds was writing The Mysteries of London. The enthusiasm for investing in speculative railway schemes was felt among both the upper and middle classes, and it was the first time that companies relied heavily on investors’ capital rather than on government bonds.[xxii] As George Robb notes, the mania for investing in railway companies was perfect for fraudsters wishing to embezzle funds from their investors: bills for the establishment of new railway companies could be obtained from parliament relatively easily, and investors had little access to sound financial advice and accurate financial data.[xxiii]

The Victorians were under no illusions about the opportunities for fraud and embezzlement that were available to unscrupulous and dishonest businessmen in the nineteenth-century financial world.[xxiv] There are many characters in Victorian literature who exemplify the crooked businessman. Clive Emsley points to Uriah Heep in Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-50), a snakelike, devious character who extorts money from the good Mr. Wickfield. Similarly, there is Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’ sensation novel The Woman in White (1859-60), who plots to claim Laura Fairlie’s fortune by faking her death.[xxv] Shore similarly points to some contemporary press reports which expose she what calls ‘a hidden financial criminal underworld, straddling a line between the criminal class and the respectable class’.[xxvi] For the most part, however, members of the supposedly respectable upper and middle classes who turned to crime were just viewed by contemporaries as ‘bad apples’ that had been led astray or placed in tempting situations.[xxvii]

Conclusion

Reynolds’ depiction of criminality amongst members of respectable society is more nuanced than Dickens or Collins: according to Reynolds there is a criminal upper class, and a criminal lower class; the underworld mirrors the upper world. Sometimes members from both spheres collaborate to cause harm to members of ‘the industrious classes’. The M.P., Eugene Markham, is not merely a ‘bad apple’ who has been led astray. Instead, he actively pursues a ‘white collar’ criminal course of life. Portraying the upper world of crime, of course, suited Reynolds’ radical sentiments: as we have seen, he detested the political establishment and ensured that in The Mysteries of London its members were implicated in criminal acts, even if their complicity is limited to merely purchasing smuggled goods.[xxviii] If a majority of the poor are indeed criminal, it is because their upper-class counterparts facilitate or indeed, as we saw with the exchange between Eugene and the Cracksman, take a leading role in directing such crime.

Notes

[i] Stephen J. Carver, ‘The Wrongs and Crimes of the Poor: The Urban Underworld of The Mysteries of London in Context’ in G.W.M. Reynolds and Nineteenth-Century British Society: Politics, Fiction and the Press  ed. by Anne Humpherys & Louis James (London: Ashgate, 2008), pp.185-212

[ii] G. W. M. Reynolds cited in Michael Diamond, ‘From Journalism and Fiction into Politics’ in Anne Humpherys & Louis James (eds.) G.W.M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), pp.91-99 (p.91).

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Reynolds’ Newspaper 23 November 1851, p.12.

[v] G. W. M. Reynolds, The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed (London, 1832), p.13.

[vi] Reynolds, The Errors of the Christian Religion Exposed, p.14.

[vii] G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 1 (London: G. Vickers, 1845), p.179.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 1, p.2.

[x] ’Jessica Hindes, ‘Revealing Bodies: Knowledge, Power and Mass Market Fictions in G.W.M. Reynolds’s Mysteries of London’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2012), p.12n: ‘Reynolds was elected to the National Chartist Association’s National Executive in 1848 with more votes than any of his fellow committee members; 1,805 to Feargus O’Connor’s 1,314’. Further discussions of Reynolds’ role in working-class and radical causes are to be found in the following works: Ian Haywood, ‘George W. M. Reynolds and “The Trafalgar Square Revolution”: Radicalism, the Carnivalesque and Popular Culture in Mid-Victorian England’ Journal of Victorian Culture 7: 1 (2002), pp.23–59

[xi] Charles Dickens, Letter to W.C. Macready, August 30, 1849, cited in Michael Diamond, Victorian Sensation: Or the Spectacular, the Shocking and the Scandalous in Victorian Britain (London: Anthem, 2003), p.191.

[xii] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 1, p.70.

[xiii] On working-class and middle-class radicalism, the alliances between the two classes, and the Reform Act of 1832 more generally, see the following works: Paul Adelman, Victorian Radicalism: The Middle-class Experience, 1830-1914 (London: Longman, 1984); Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c.1780-c.1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Nancy D. LoPatin, Political Unions, Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832 (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1999); Eric J. Evans, Britain Before the Reform Act: Politics and Society 1815-1832 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008).

[xiv] Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p.451.

[xv] G. W. M. Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 2 (London: G. Vickers, 1846), p.187.

[xvi]  Kelly Hignett, ‘Organised Crime in East Central Europe: The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland’ Global Crime 6: 1 (2004), pp.70-83 (p.71).

[xvii] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 1, p.149.

[xviii] Ibid.

[xix] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 1, p.150.

[xx] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 2, p.95.

[xxi] Ibid.

[xxii] George Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.31-32.

[xxiii] Robb, White-Collar Crime, p.34.

[xxiv] Robb, White-Collar Crime, p.3.

[xxv] Emsley, Crime and Society, p.58.

[xxvi] Shore, London’s Criminal Underworlds, p.3.

[xxvii] Emsley, Crime and Society, p.58.

[xxviii] Reynolds, The Mysteries of London Vol. 1, p.191.