I n those remarkable documents, the last dying speeches of the condemned, we have several sources of great insight into the nature of crime in times past, and in eighteenth century Dublin in particular. Thanks to the work of writer James Kelly, we have an accessible collection to peruse and in that reading, we find the criminal underworld of the Georgian period laid open to us.
These were speeches compiled often from the death cell. In Newgate there was a tradition that the ordinary (or warder) would put together these biographies from the mouths of the people about to die. As we might expect, there were many different varieties of these, but there are common areas of writing: they usually have some kind of remorse and confession; they recount the particulars of the offence; sometimes they are in a moral and religious tone, and in many cases there is an extended defence of what the crime has been, with suitable words spoken to parents, moral guides, authority or even to the poor families about to be bereft of a member of their clan.
But for understanding the range of crimes in the period, and also in their revelations of how crime functioned, they are valuable documents. The other feature is, of course, that they are in the first person, and so they may seem at times as though they are monologues from the very heart of a life on the edge, a life about to face eternity.
In a cluster of speeches from one period, the 1720s and 1730s, we can gather some very typical criminal lives; the story of James Stevens, for instance, hanged at Stephen’s Green in May 1726, for ‘feloniously taking from Mr Philip Kennersly of Dame Street, a glass case, value £50’, we have a reminder of the severity of the ‘Bloody Code’ of capital offences in Georgian Britain. Stevens protested his innocence (as almost every prisoner does) and gave as his reason for bothering to make a speech, that he wanted those who had lied about him to be revealed. He gave their names: ‘Considerations move me to make this, my only and last, were I not sensible of the many villainous falsities which might be published …by persons of the vilest characters.. such as one Hoy in Pembroke-Court.’
Stevens was born in London and had been brought up to a trade, in portraiture. He was given an apprenticeship and did well. But wanting to see the world, he joined the army and travelled abroad. Returning home, he went into the licensed coaches business, and even had dealings with wealthy people such as the Blounts; but we do not know what the ‘many misfortunes’ were that came on him and made him leave for a new life in Ireland. But he came to Dublin and followed his trade, but then he met a woman who he argued was the cause of his ruin. He even named her: Eleanour Fenly. She also had a brother who participated in ruining him, a certain Fernando Fenly. Fernando it was who ‘grassed’ on Stevens: he said that ‘about the 25th of March last I had a box of goods which were Mr. Kennerly’s, afterwards found in his custody, and that I paid him two shillings for carriage from the Sun Inn in Francis Street…’