Moore - Con men and cutpurses: scenes from the Hogarthian underworld

Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld

Edited by LUCY MOORE

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First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2000

Published in Penguin Books 2001

Introduction and headnotes copyright Lucy Moore, 2000

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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EISBN: 9780141906034

Imagine a damp winter morning in the middle of the eighteenth century at Tyburn, now Marble Arch. In those days, Tyburn was at the edge of London: the newly-built West End houses of the nobility reached up to it from the south-east, and the villages of Hampstead in the north and Kensington, with Chelsea past it to the south-west, were just visible in daylight. But this early it is still dark, and misty, and the people jostling around you climbing up the temporary wooden stands known as Mother Procters Pews to ensure the best view later, quarrelling over the price of an apple or a ballad-sheet are like shadows.

Fresh straw is strewn on the ground, and there is the clean smell of cold mud, but mostly the smells are unpleasant, aggravated by the close anonymity of the crowd: the stale sweat that comes after a night of drinking, rotten stumps of teeth that have never been cleaned, ragged clothes taken off not for sleeping nor sex nor disease. The rich will come later, slumming, and pay for their places high up in the stands (although they could not claim to be much cleaner); these are poor people, here to celebrate the life and death of one of their own.

The route from Newgate Prison, next to the Old Bailey, runs by the church of St Sepulchre, where as the condemned men pass the bells toll for their souls, through the meat-market at Smithfield and past the taverns and whorehouses of Holborn and Covent Garden and Soho up to Oxford Road (now Oxford Street) and on to the makeshift stadium at Tyburn. The victim our hero sits in a jolting, open cart, his cold hands unbound, between two chaplains repeating like a dirge the need for salvation to a man who has seen few instances of mercy or hope in his short life. Ahead of him is the carriage carrying the Ordinary, or head chaplain of Newgate; half-a-dozen pike-bearing Javelin Men wearing the livery of the City of London bring up the rear on horseback. He is enclosed by the representatives of what the cynical might call hypocritical piety one eighteenth-century Ordinary not only published accounts of his charges last days, which most of them did, but also ran a profitable funeral business for them on one side, and those of an inefficient, parochial system of justice on the other. It is no surprise that the men on the tumbrel pride themselves on dying unbowed and unrepentant before their peers.

Finally, after the prayers have been said by the chaplain, a coin pressed into the palm of the executioner and his last words cried out by the dying man, the cart lurches off out from under his feet and, as the saying went, with a stiff neck and a wet pair of breeches, he swings out into the hereafter. This moment on the gallows is the final breath of the condemned man but it is the starting point, and central focus, of the following pieces of writing that document and describe criminal life in eighteenth-century London.

The criminals heroic identity and the tradition
of criminal literature

Although some criminals hanged at Tyburn were not working class, the majority were young and poor, and determined to assert with a flourish their freedom from the restrictions of the life that had driven them to crime. As the pirate Captain Bartholomew Roberts asserted in Captain Johnsons 1724 A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates: In an honest service, there is commonly low wages and hard labour; in this [a life of crime], plenty, satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power; and who would not balance creditor on this side, when all the hazard that is run for it at worst, is only a sour look or two at choking? No a merry life and a short one, shall be my motto. Roberts was one of the lucky ones. He escaped the gallows but died in a sea battle, having ordered his men to throw his body overboard if he was wounded and might be captured.

Poor women bore a double burden of discrimination as well as poverty; and so if they dared, the advantages of turning to crime were commensurably greater. Although Moll Flanders is fictional, her story illustrates the ways in which a woman might try to escape the curse of being no more than a chattel by viewing herself as a commodity that she rather than a father or husband or master might exploit. The women who dressed as men, like the pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny, had courage and ambition which only living as a man in a mans world could satisfy; both, apparently, were highly attractive to men, both freely used their femininity and neither seems to have disguised herself for any sexual reason in fact, both dropped their disguises with alacrity at the prospect of romance. The thief Sarah Stanley, on the other hand, who was described as being of masculine mien, may well have dressed as a man and joined the army because she did not want to be a woman at all.