While the Ordinary was carrying out his painstaking work, a different style of crime reporting was establishing itself. The nation was witnessing the creation of the ‘celebrity criminal’, a genre that would last to this day, and it encompassed both the burgeoning ‘broadsides’ – the newspapers of their day, printed initially on one side only – and the work of some of the finest writers of the period. This glamorisation came about both as a result of contemporary reports and of romanticised, semi-fictionalised accounts produced subsequently by authors. During the early part of the eighteenth century, three of Britain’s most famous – or notorious – criminals were operating: the thief and master-escaper, Jack Sheppard, who was executed in 1724; his nemesis, the thief-taker Jonathan Wild, who died on the scaffold the following year; and, perhaps the best-known of the three today, Dick Turpin, who met his end in 1739.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that their rise to notoriety coincided with the careers of three of Britain’s greatest writers: Daniel Defoe, John Gay and Henry Fielding, author of Tom Jones. Defoe put the growing criminality and its press coverage in context when he wrote about the crime wave that followed the ‘South Sea Bubble’ in 1720. This was the catastrophic investment scandal involving the South Sea Company, which had rights to trade with South American countries – hence the name – and corrupt politicians. It led to ruin for the huge numbers who had unwisely invested.
The American writer Aaron Skirball credits Defoe as the ‘wily old newspaperman’ whose coverage of Wild and Sheppard ‘enthralled a kingdom and birthed a genre’. He concluded that Defoe gave us the celebrity criminal, who has since been seen so often in literature and on film in the shape of highwaymen, wild west outlaws, train robbers and Mafia bosses. The broadsides played their part in this, writing of daring robbers, escapers and highwaymen much in the same way as a twentieth-century press would later do of Soho and East End gangsters, great train robbers and jewellery thieves, with that intoxicating cocktail of disapproval, fascination and exaggeration.
‘On a sudden we found street robberies became the common practice,’ wrote Defoe, who spent time in prison himself for publishing a religious tract, ‘conversation was full of the variety of them, the newspapers had them every day, and sometimes more than ever were committed; and those that were committed were set off by the invention of the writers.’
One of the writers accused of invention was ‘Captain’ Alexander Smith, who had started a trend that was to continue for the next three hundred years, of detailing both exploits and the early lives of criminals. Smith, who may have awarded himself the ‘captain’ title, was a prolific recorder of the seamy side of life. His 1714 publication was called ‘The History of the Lives of the most noted Highwayman, Footpads, Housebreakers, Shoplifts and Cheats of both sexes, in and about London, and in other places in Great Britain for above forty years past’.
Smith promised readers ‘most secret and barbarous Murders, unparallel’d Robberies, notorious Thefts, and unheard of Cheats’. His official rationale was that, by reading in detail the shocking lives and fatal ends of criminals, people would be deterred from crime. He made big claims for his work, saying his accounts were not taken from the Ordinaries but were the ‘first impartial Piece of this Nature which ever appeared in Europe.’ He apologised to readers for some of the oaths and curses he recorded but explained that he was only doing so to paint the criminals ‘in their proper colours, whose words are always so odious, detestable and foul that some, as little acquainted with a God as they would be apt to conclude that Nature spoiled ’em in the Making by setting their mouths in the wrong end of their bodies.’ He stressed that he was not exposing these ‘offending wretches with any design of making them sport and ridicule of vain idle fellows who only laugh at the misfortunes of such dying men but rather revive their manifold transgressions for a means to instruct and convert the wicked and prophane persons of this licentious age’.
His accounts are entertaining. Writing of the Cambridgeshire highwayman Ned Bonnet, who was executed in 1713, he reported how he had robbed rich young gentlemen students whom he found in a brothel and, because they gave him some trouble before handing over their money, made them strip naked, tied them to their horse, and sent them into Cambridge for the entertainment of the crowd who were ‘hallooing and hooting’ after them. Smith used his reports to bring moral messages to his readers. In his account of the murderer and highwayman, William Holloway, from Staffordshire, who blamed alcohol for his crime in 1712, saying that he had been ‘in drink’ and unaware of what he was doing, Smith concluded: ‘thus we may evidently see the fatal consequences of drunkenness which odious vice is now become so fashionable’. Taverns and alehouses were ‘academies of sin’.
The reports tell us about both the modus operandi of criminals and the class system of the time. Smith’s writing on women criminals also demonstrates the different standards by which female offenders were judged in the press. Mary or Moll Raby, who operated under a number of aliases – much easier in those pre-photo, pre-fingerprint days – was convicted of robbing Lady Cavendish in Soho Square in 1703 and Smith adds that she had given herself up to ‘whoredom and adultery’ and, before she was hanged, admitted other wickednesses including ‘Sabbath-breaking and swearing, drinking, lewdness, disposing of stolen goods and harbouring of ill people’. Smith reported that on one occasion she sneaked into a house in Downing Street and hid under a bed while the residents and their dog dined in the same room and she became so nervous that she ‘discharged herself . . . which made such a great stink that it offended the people who supposing it to be the dog turned him out’ and left the room, allowing Raby to steal the bed linen. On another occasion, Raby supposedly stole a pearl necklace off the sleeping landlady of a Wapping inn and swallowed the pearls. When the landlady woke and accused Raby of the crime, she allowed herself to be stripped naked in a private room to prove her innocence.
Anne Holland, a pickpocket who had five aliases, was described by Smith as being ‘very clean-skinned, well-shaped, having a sharp piercing eye’ but this only meant that she attracted many a man ‘under Cupid’s banner’ which led to her inevitable decline: ‘if once a woman passes the bounds of modesty she seldom stops till she hath arrived at the very height of impudence’. Her courage on the scaffold in 1705 – cursing the judge for his ‘hard heart’ – did not impress Smith, who was sure that her soul would be delivered into ‘less merciful hands’ than if she had repented.
The first of the trio of ‘celebrity villains’ of the period, Jack Sheppard, was a wily thief and master-escaper and it was his skill in the latter capacity that captured the public’s imagination. The sneaking admiration in the press for the escaper has lasted to the present day as the great train robber, Ronnie Biggs, demonstrated when he went over the wall at Wandsworth prison in 1965 and remained a folk-hero for many thereafter. Sheppard’s reputation was confirmed by the ‘History of the Remarkable Life of Jack Sheppard and the Life of Jonathan Wild Thief-taker General of Great Britain and Ireland’, which is often attributed to Defoe, and was supposedly published as ‘a warning to young men’. We learn of one of Sheppard’s four spectacular escapes in 1724 that ‘it has been allow’d by all the Jayl-Keepers in London, that one so Miraculous was never perform’d before in England’. But the writer noted drily that Sheppard ‘returns like a Dog to his Vomit’ and is soon caught again and executed that same year, much to the fury and dismay of the public who crowded onto the streets as he was taken to the gallows.
Sheppard’s celebrity was such that the printer and publisher John Applebee, whose Weekly Journal specialised in crime tales, paid him a retainer of eight pence a day as he awaited his end, in order to secure his exclusive story. The Journal portrayed him as a dashing character in ‘a handsome suit of Black, with a Diamond Ring and a Cornelian ring on his finger’. Henry Mayhew later noted, in London Labour and the London Poor, that, ‘Of all books, perhaps none has ever had so baneful effect upon the young mind, taste, and principles’ as the one on Sheppard; he suggested that young Londoners were more familiar with it than the Bible.
Jonathan Wild, who gloried in the title of ‘Thief-taker General’, played on both sides of the law although his nickname – still used in the twentieth century by some senior police officers anxious to be portrayed as tough on crime – refers to his function of arresting miscreants in the pre-police era. He operated in London as a successful gangster and, by the 1720s, had a profitable criminal empire. The expanding press had fuelled a fear of crime and Wild took advantage of this and the absence of any organised police force; the Bow Street Runners did not arrive until 1749 and a proper Metropolitan police force until 1829. Wild used the newspapers to his own ends, placing advertisements in them which advised anyone who had been robbed to come to his Lost Property Office which was handily placed in the Old Bailey. There he would agree a fee for finding the stolen goods and the victims would return a few days later to pay the money and get their property back.
Gerald Howson, in his biography Thief-taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild, calculated that between 1714 and 1724 Wild was responsible for the punishment by hanging, transportation, branding or imprisonment of up to 150 people. He was brutal even to those close to him, as the Tyburn Chronicle reported of Mary Milliner or Molyneaux, a prostitute who became Wild’s wife: ‘she had some time so provoked him to wrath that he swore he would mark her for a bitch, and thereupon drawing his sword, he cut off one of her ears – this occasioned a divorce’. Because of his reputation as a dodgy double-dealer his demise was widely celebrated by the poor. Here is how the London Journal reported it: ‘so outrageous were the mob in their joy to behold him on the road to the gallows, who had been the cause of sending so many thither; that they huzza’d him along to the Triple Tree.’
Dick Turpin made up this triumvirate of villainy. Central to the myth surrounding him was the idea that he would always be one step ahead of the law, and the press played a major part in this. Reid’s Weekly Journal, in May 1737, reported: ‘the people about Epping Forest say he will never be taken till a proclamation offering a reward for apprehending of him and give the reason, that as he has declared he will never be taken alive but he will kill, or be killed, and it will be dangerous to attempt it’. His robbery of a farmer called Joseph Lawrence in 1735, carried out with others, was particularly brutal, with the elderly victim having his trousers pulled round his ankles and his bare buttocks held over the fire to force him to say where his money was. James Sharpe in Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman, notes how Turpin became a romantic character when he was in reality a thug.
In July 1737 the political periodical Common Sense had already objected to the way Turpin was being portrayed. How could it happen, the publication asked, that a ‘fellow, who is known to be a thief by the whole kingdom shall for a long time rob us, and not only so, but to make jest of us, shall defy the laws and laugh at justice’? This was to set a theme for the coverage of professional criminals – as opposed to murderers – over the next three centuries: horrified fascination at the skill and daring followed by stern disapproval that they were even being written about.
When Turpin was finally arrested, the General Evening Post of 8 March 1739 described how ‘a great concourse of people flock to see him, and they all give him money. He seems very sure that nobody is alive that can hurt him, and told the gentleman that used to hunt with him, that he hoped to have another day’s sport with him yet . . . He is put every night into the condemned hold, which is a very strong place.’ The reports of the time pointed out that even then the criminals were complaining that the press had got them wrong. ‘Turpin confessed himself to be really the man so infamous for his robberies in the south part of England, tho’ he denied many facts father’d on him in the public prints.’
After Turpin’s execution in 1739, highwaymen featured less prominently in the press, with only four showing up in The Newgate Calendar compendium from 1750–61, being outnumbered by notorious murderers or, a new breed, forgers. What is remarkable is how Turpin was later mythologised, due in no small part to an embroidered and imagined account of his life by the prolific nineteenth-century writer, William Harrison Ainsworth, who created this fantasy highwayman: ‘rash daring was the main feature of Turpin’s character. Like our great Nelson he knew fear only by name.’ The appetite for tales of derring-do remained unabated. As Kevin Williams noted in Moral Panics, Social Fears and the Media, readers of the triweekly Whitehall Evening Post were treated to a regular fare of ‘footpads stealing watches, wigs and purses from passers-by; of highwaymen haunting the heaths and roads of London . . . of gangs creating sham disturbances in order to commit hit-and-run robberies.’ This led to the baleful conclusion in the paper, voiced in 1749 and echoed over the decades, that ‘there is no Possibility of stirring from our Habitations after dark without Hazard of a fractured Skull.’