Stevens then seems to have become embroiled in fights and general street crime, mixing with Eleanour and a man called Byrne. He says that he acquired a bad reputation; but whatever the truth, his line of thought here is that he was, as we say today, ‘fitted up’ and sent for trial. The world he was moving about in was very much like that described by Daniel Defoe in his novel, Moll Flanders (1722) in which we have an insight into the class divisions in that society and also into the tremendous risks taken by those who looked for opportunities for shop-lifting and burglary. With over 200 capital crimes on the statute books, a thief was more than likely to either be hanged or transported merely for the theft of an animal or a yard of cloth.

But there was more to Stevens than the man we have through reading this speech. As we match his statement with those made by an accomplice, a small area of the criminal underworld is momentarily lit up for the modern reader. Although there is a lot of criminal literature available for the Georgian underclass, much of it has been distorted by film and popular media. The truth under that is that the life at the bottom of society was ‘nasty, brutish and short’ and that we have to rely on reading between the lines to find something near the truth of many of these crimes and their strange narratives.