Category Archives: Criminality in the Eighteenth Century

The Boy Gangs of London

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A Rake's Progress, Plate 4

A Rake’s Progress, Plate 4, print, William Hogarth (MET, 91.1.86). 25 June 1735. Etching and engraving; third state of three. plate: 14 1/16 x 16 1/4 in. (35.7 x 41.3 cm); sheet: 15 3/4 x 18 3/4 in. (40 x 47.7 cm). Wikimedia Commons.

Try this experiment:  Google “child” and “criminal.”  Pages and pages of horrific crimes committed by adults against children will pop up.  Now search “juvenile” and “criminal.”  This time you will either find instances of local politicians ranting against dangerous marauding boys roaming the streets to steal cars, or activists from non-profits bewailing the injustices of a legal system that incarcerates disadvantaged youth.  Both search results show young individuals’ interactions with adults, but those victimized are children and those perceived as predatory are juveniles.

This current use of “juvenile” as the preferred term to denote children who commit crimes is a legacy of nineteenth-century justice reform that created a separate set of laws for young criminals and set up the first “juvenile prison” (Griffiths).  Before that, the word “juvenile” occurred rarely in legal discourse.  In the eighteenth century, children were subject to the same laws as adults, they could be transported to penal colonies or incarcerated along with older, hardened criminals.  According to the letter of the law, children under seven could not be charged with a felony as they did not yet know “right from wrong,” and at fourteen a child had full criminal liability as an adult.  But the years eight to fourteen were a kind of gray area in which the court had to judge the youthful offender’s guilt and levy appropriate punishment.  As ages of street children were difficult to determine, for all intents and purposes they often were as vulnerable to harsh punishments as any adult (Giovanopoulos).

The plight of these young criminals–not yet the legal “juvenile” we recognize today, suspended unstably between child and adult in the court of law–sparked the imagination of contemporary novelists.  Particularly, the prevalence of boy gangs on London streets working together to steal from passersby and shop windows has been famously preserved for us in literature by Daniel Defoe’s 1722 depiction of bands of roving boys “Bred up for the Gallows” in Colonel Jack and by Charles Dickens’s 1838 creation of Fagin’s network of pickpockets in Oliver Twist[i] (Defoe).

But what of the real boy gangs from the period that caught the attention of these novelists?  Were they childlike?  Or hardened adult-like criminals?  This is the story of one such gang operating in eighteenth-century London.

In 1737, the courtroom at Old Bailey courthouse in London saw the collapse of a gang of shoplifters, consisting of about seven or eight young boys along with their “receiver,” the adult Nichols Correl, who bought their stolen goods (“Trial of Thomas Chap, Nicholas Correl”).  The story of this network of thieving boys comes from trial transcripts published in the Old Bailey Proceedings, a periodical publication meant for popular audiences–the older version of today’s true-crime podcasts perhaps (Shoemaker).  Though supposed to be a factual documentation of the cases heard in the Old Bailey Courthouse, the OBP catered to the hearty eighteenth-century appetite for real life crime narratives.  But as a collation of all the trials held at a major court in London, the sheer volume of trial information available in the OBP is also an unmatched source for researchers today studying the nuances of youth crime before the emergence of laws, prisons, and institutions geared specifically towards juvenile offenders.  Not that the image of criminal children preserved in the OBP is holistic enough to be accurate.  After all, these trial narratives, though meant for the reading pleasure of popular audiences, are also fundamentally pro-court publications, unquestioningly accepting the fundamental integrity of the legal proceedings as well as its ability to deliver justice effectively.  Think of our own Law and Order episodes “based on real cases”– as riveting as they might be, they never really question the necessity or morality of the legal system.  Still, even with these caveats about the accuracy or reliability of the OBP trial transcripts, it remains one of the most important repositories of information about criminal children in the past.

So, the 1737 OBP account of two trials involving Nicholas Correl, our real-life Fagin, and a “Gang of Boys” stealing from shops or passersby, preyed upon by adult crooks, and targeted by the law is useful for thinking about the culpability, vulnerability, as well as vitality of boy criminals both then and now (“Trial of Richard Murray”).  The boy gang of the eighteenth century was nothing like the youth gangs we have today, of course, with their strong identity affiliations and violent initiation rituals.  Instead, they were more likely to be a loose network based on shifting and contingent connections made with other youth in order to pilfer from pedestrians or storefronts.  Ironically, though, the “neighborhood watch” style surveillance meant to keep streets safe from criminal elements that has become so notorious today was very much in force even in the eighteenth century.  Indeed, one might say it was even the norm.

The story of Nicholas Correl and his gang began when Ann Wibley, who owned a shop in Petty France, Westminster, discovered two bolts of checked cotton and thirty pairs of stockings missing from her shop.  She immediately suspected “a parcel of Boys” seen loitering around her neighborhood and marched to the local constable, Robert Adams, intent on having them arrested for questioning.  Wibley was not a “Karen” even though she seems to have acted so by today’s standards.  Indeed, her behavior was the recommended approach to suspicious behavior.  Like a “neighborhood watch” on steroids, eighteenth-century Londoners were expected to always be on the lookout for potential criminals, identify suspects and even apprehend wrong-doers before contacting a constable (“Policing in London”).  And in this, Wibley’s detective instincts proved correct.

The gang of boys was rounded up by the constable and crumbled under the violence of being pulled out of their beds and the threat of dire punishment.  Not only did they quickly unite in indicting Correl, the man who typically bought their stolen ware, they also began implicating each other in an effort to save themselves.  One of the boys, James Grayham, turned King’s witness, giving details of how he and five other boys collaborated on not one but two robberies, each time selling the goods to Correl.

Grayham’s stories of how the robberies went down show us the youth gang’s complicated interactions with each other, the court, and the adults around them.  He names seven or eight boys as collaborating together to steal cloth from Wibley’s shop.  One puts his arm over the door hatch to unbolt it, goes in and they pass bits of merchandise from one boy to another.  The gang’s cooperation is important to their success as well as survival, compensating for the vulnerability of the lone child on the London streets who was often an orphan or left to fend for himself.  In Grayham’s testimony we hear of one John Southall whose contribution to a theft of footwear was, that he, “lifted up the Sash, and pull’d the Shoes within Reach with his Crutch, (for he was a lame Boy;).”  Southall later gets his share of the considerable spoils and even tries to sell a pair of stockings on his own to a soldier on the street.  The economic benefit that a physically disabled and impoverished boy like Southall derived from his criminal network indicates the attraction that such gangs offered young boys who might otherwise perish in the harsh cityscape.

But despite the collaboration in crime, the trust between them that allows them to postpone sharing the loot at a more opportune time, and the personal connections forged through hours spent with each other in play or at the local gin-joint, these boys can be no more than frenemies.  All friendships or community dissolve under the pressures of survival and fear.  At any point a boy could turn against his comrade, as in the case of Grayham turning witness against his gang.

The seemingly kafkaesque legal proceedings in which the logic of exoneration or punishment are never clear surely didn’t help.  Even for a modern reader, the basis of punishment in a case can sometimes seem incomprehensible despite the OBP’s ideological goal of upholding the justice system.  For example, though Grayham’s testimony for the prosecution describes the contribution of several boys in the robbery, only a boy named Thomas Chap is sentenced with transportation even though his role seems no more significant than any other gang members.  So, for the boys actually caught in its vice, the value of group loyalty must always compete with impossible calculations about the unpredictable illogicality of who might be punished and to what extent.

But in the OBP we also get a rare glimpse of these boys’ complex emotional lives–along with perhaps even hearing the actual voices of these generally silenced and marginalized children.  An indignant prosecutor shares an anecdote about a boy named Richard Murray from the same gang who is arrested for another robbery on the basis of his accomplice’s testimony.  When he is taken to Gatehouse prison to be held for trial along with the other boys from the gang, they greet Murray with hoots and hollers:  “What Captain – are you come too?” they say, and looking at his fetters ask, “are you booted?”  To these jocular queries, Murray replies shaking his ironed leg proudly, “Aye I am come among you my Boys, and Yes yes, I am booted” (“Trial of Richard Murray”).  To the accuser, this vignette is evidence of the boy’s incorrigible shamelessness and lack of moral sense.  For modern readers though, the exchange is more poignant than damning.  Even though he has just been betrayed by a boy from his gang, as Murray is reunited with his old network he displays a kind of desperate camaraderie with his frenemies poised between resilience and trauma, which seems to hold the young gang together, at least for the moment.

A more enduring bond between them seems to be their eagerness to implicate the adult receiver, Nicholas Correl, who buys their stolen goods for pennies to a pound.  But unlike Dickens’s Fagin who is the arch-villain and an embodiment of unrelenting evil, Correl is almost pathetically comic despite his very real exploitation of the young gang of thieves.  Two of the boys in the gang actually live with him as “two-penny lodgers,” which indicates his pivotal role in using the boys for his own profit.  But though he does seem to have some power and control over them, it is imperfect at best.  The boys don’t seem bound to take the stolen goods to him, often peddling commodities like stockings and shoes on the street or selling them to the pawnbroker.  And during the raid on their gang, they have Correl at their mercy, implicating him thoroughly.

Correl, possibly a retired soldier, first denies any involvement when the constable pays a visit to him with Wibley.  But after being roughed up by the constable, he promises to cooperate on the condition that the lawman stop hurting him.  Emerging as much a victim of the law as victimizer of the children, Correl’s story slips into black comedy when he sends his wife into the house to fetch the bolt of Check cloth stolen from Wibley’s shop.  The poor wife goofs up, bringing not only the fabric in question but also another piece linking Correl to a different robbery by the boy gang.  He is indicted a second time for this, and the constable’s explanation of the discovery reads like deadpan comedy today as he intones, “Correl’s Wife brought me this Ticken with the Check. I did not ask for this.” The adult mastermind supposed to be running the boys’ crime ring ends up looking more like a weak, incompetent fumbler at the mercy of the law and the young thieves who have sicced the constable on him rather than a manipulative exploiter of children.

The boys we see in this trial account might technically be children, probably by eighteenth-century standards, and definitely by present-day standards.  But they do not quite fit the binary we have inherited from the distinct Victorian legal system for young delinquents that skews our internet search results so that “children” are those against whom crimes are committed while “juveniles” are those who commit crimes.  The semantic sleight of hand preserves everything our culture cherishes about the “child”–innocence, vulnerability, optimism, candidness, generosity of affection.  The “juvenile” on the other hand becomes a convenient shorthand for all the aspects of children we would rather not acknowledge:  their potential for cunning, deceptiveness, anger, greed, criminality.  The symbiotic criminality that tied together Nicholas Correl and the boy gang in 1737 is difficult to articulate using modern categories.  However, reality is shaped by its representation, and this case is only one milestone in the ever-shifting landscape of legal systems.

While in the United States, the struggle to define juvenile culpability for crimes which acknowledge the tender age of the offenders continues, the United Kingdom has formally introduced a new legal category that helps frame some juvenile criminals as vulnerable children.  The Child Criminal Exploitation law argues that unlike the more familiar paradigms of child sexual exploitation, “A child may have been exploited even if it looks as if they have been a willing participant” in committing crimes with or for adults.  The CCE argues that “[m]any young people do not see themselves as victims,” so the law is needed to protect children from the kind of gang criminality in which we saw Thomas Chap, James Grayham, and Richard Murray involved.  Perhaps revisiting the old case files of criminal children will help shape these newly emerging categories, which in turn might help us to rethink young offenders of the past.

Notes

[1] For more about Defoe’s depiction of child criminality, see my “Criminal Children in the Eighteenth Century and Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack,” Philological Quarterly 96.1 (2017):  27-53.

Works Cited

Defoe, Daniel.  Colonel Jack.  Ed. Samuel Monk.  Oxford:  Oxford UP, 1965.

Giovanopoulos, Ann-Christina.  “The Legal Status of Children in Eighteenth-Century England.”  Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century:  Age and Identity.  Ed. Anja Müller.  Aldershot:  Ashgate, 2006.  43-52.

Griffiths, Paul.  “Juvenile Delinquency in Time.”  Becoming Delinquent:  British and European Youth, 1650-1950.  Eds. P. Cox and H. Shore.  London:  Ashgate, 2002.  23-40.

“Trial of Thomas Chap, Nicholas Correl” (t17371207-63).  Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0).  December 1737.  <https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17371207-63?text=%22thomas%20chap%22>.  Accessed 10 Feb. 2024.

“Trial of Richard Murray” (t17371207-66).  Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 9.0).  December 1737.  <https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17371207-66?text=%22richard%20murray%22>.  Accessed 10 Feb. 2024.

“Policing in London.” Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  <https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/about/policing>.  Accessed 10 Feb. 2024.

Shoemaker, R.B.  “The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth‐Century London,” Journal of British Studies 47.3 (2008):  559-580.

“Prompted by the Violence of her Passion”: Gendered Crime in the 18th Century and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess

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A View of the South Front of the North Side of the Marshalsea Prison (1812), Unknown Artist after James Lewis, 1751–1820

When Melliora’s father dies in Eliza Haywood’s 1719 novel Love in Excess, she is entrusted into the care of D’elmont.  Despite her sadness for her dying father, Melliora cannot help but fall for the Count the moment that her father turns her over to him.  Haywood describes the complexity of Melliora’s feelings in this moment as follows:  “she had just lost a dear and tender father, whose care was ever watchful for her . . . she had no other relation in the world to apply her self to for comfort . . . [but D’elmont] whom she found it dangerous to make use of, whom she knew it was a crime to love, yet could not help loving” (Haywood 88).  The use of the word “crime” in this moment perfectly structures the tension within the narrative of Love in Excess.  Haywood’s reconceptualization of love as a “crime” treats characters’ actions in pursuit of love as forms of crimes of passion.  Furthermore, her criminality of love challenges gendered constructs of the eighteenth century.  According to the Old Bailey Online, while men were viewed as the stronger sex, they were expected to be more intelligent, courageous, and determined.  Alternatively, women were believed to be controlled by their emotions, leading to expectations of chastity, modesty, and compassion.  Therefore, the expected faults of men were primarily acts of aggression (including violence and selfishness), whereas female faults centered on sins of the body (including lust and shrewishness) (“Gender in the Proceedings”).  Sins of the body are exemplified in Haywood’s Love in Excess as women navigate their criminal affections.  Examining the proceedings of real trials from the eighteenth century in relation to Haywood’s Love in Excess creates a space to address how constructs of gender in both real and imagined narratives determined criminal activity.  Furthermore, this intersection between the real and imagined allows for a look at the ubiquity of widespread patriarchal institutions.  Haywood’s criminal love demonstrates not only the economic and emotional struggles that women were facing but also how the lengths they went to fulfill their needs were met with a gendered response.

The statistics of crimes committed in the eighteenth century show that women stood trial far less than men.  The Old Bailey Online reveals that from the 1690s to the 1740s, women accounted for 40% of defendants.  This number significantly declined over the course of the eighteenth century, until reaching as low as 22% at the start of the nineteenth century (“Gender in the Proceedings”).  In accordance, in examining the archives, I found that of the estimated 48,000 cases that saw trial from 1701 to 1800, about 69% consisted of male defendants, while 31% were female.  Since 2019 marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of Love in Excess, I examined the 433 cases that went to trial in 1719:  154 involved female defendants, whereas 279 involved male defendants (Table 1).  Although the majority of female defendants faced trials centered on killing and theft, their crimes were likely to be focused on their failure to adhere to expectations ascribed to their gender.  These gendered crimes included infanticide, concealing a birth, unlawful abortion, theft, and coining (including keeping a brothel) (“Gender in the Proceedings”).  Additionally, of the 154 females that stood trial in the year 1719, only 86 were found guilty, 10 of whom successfully received a respite for pregnancy (Table 2).

One reason behind female theft could be the economic hardships that women encountered in London.  Specifically, women’s wages were significantly lower than men’s and rarely guaranteed.  Knowing this, it should be no surprise to suggest that women perhaps participated in various acts of theft to make ends meet.  Of the 145 female theft cases in 1719, 15 involved shoplifting.  Chloe Wigston-Smith discusses her examination of the Old Bailey Online proceedings in her book Women, Work and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (2013) and notes that many stolen items involved textiles, garments, or accessories.  She further explains how some women used their own clothes to assist in shoplifting (Wigston-Smith 95).  Similarly, I found a case in 1719 of Mary Wilson, who was taken to trial for stealing four pairs of Worsted stockings.  When she was apprehended, authorities found the stockings hidden “up her Coats” (“Mary Wilson”).  Wilson was found guilty and sentenced to transportation.  In addition to clothing, women would use accessories to assist in shoplifting.  Urphane Mackhoule, for example, was found guilty in 1719 for stealing a pair of silver buckles.  She did this by entering a shop and requesting some aniseed to distract the merchant.  When the merchant turned his back, Mackhoule placed the buckles in her basket.  She later confessed and was also sentenced to transportation (“Urphane Mackhoule”).  Although the proceedings do not address specifically why Wilson and Mackhoule were stealing stockings and buckles, it is reasonable to infer that female acts of shoplifting could be rooted in an inability to afford the items they needed or desired due to economic hardships brought on by the gendered wage gap.

In addition to shoplifting, pocket-picking consisted of 11 crimes that women saw trial for in 1719.  In the case of pocket-picking, Wigston-Smith explains that women “often worked together and that their schemes could involve between 2 and 7 women to distract the attention of victims” (Wigston-Smith 96).  In a 1719 case, Mary Clarke was accused of following John Burcher into an alley.  When Burcher was distracted by a “fight” between two women who had amassed a crowd, he claimed that Clarke slipped her hand in his pocket and stole seven shillings.  It is unclear whether Clarke was working with the women or taking advantage of the situation, but she was eventually found not guilty (“Mary Clarke”).  However, as Wigston-Smith notes, accusations of women pocket-picking can be further complicated by the number of cases that also involved prostitution.  She notes that “pick-pockets were often equated with prostitutes, as both professions shared the same working space of the streets” (Wigston-Smith 96).  The connection between prostitution and pocket-picking appeared so often that many judges would assume that men who claimed to be robbed in specific areas of London had actually been visiting a prostitute (96-97).  Lastly, cases involving female pocket-picking could be fabricated when men purposefully wrongly accused women of theft in retaliation of rejected romantic advances.  Some men even planted objects on their female rejectors to get them arrested (98).  The number of fabricated accusations of female theft by men that saw trial further creates a gendered divide.  In this moment the women are on trial twice:  first, for the knowingly incorrect accusation of theft and, second, for being a woman who dared to reject a man.

Aside from various forms of theft and coining, women of the eighteenth century also often worked in the streets of London by singing ballads.  Women flooded the ballad profession to use their voices to make money.  Tim Fulford examines how the increase in the number of poor women can be attributed to the number of deaths of soldiers in Europe, America, the West Indies, and India, as well as the growth of London as a space of promise of commerce that drew these women in from the country (Fulford 313).  Additionally, Branford P. Millar has described these women as often elderly and “tattered,” and Paula McDowell explains that they could sometimes be disabled or blind (Miller 129, McDowell 175).  Ballad singers would sing loudly in the streets, often encouraging passersby to purchase print copies.  Female involvement in ballad-singing not only provided women with some economic support but also a space for women to express their emotional responses to governmental structures through veiled lyrics.  While ballads could contain the news or bawdy jokes, the ones that focused on social and political issues often resulted in arrest.  Ballads were believed to be dangerous because they could stir up nationalist pride or feelings of unrest.  Much of the information that we have of these female ballad-singers comes from records of their time in and out of jails and correction houses (McDowell 156).  Elizabeth Smith, for example, was arrested for selling “The Highland Lasses Wish,” a Jacobite ballad that praised James Francis Edward, the Old Pretender.  A 1719 search of the English Broadside Ballad Archive yields a ballad about the Lady Arabella Stuart called “The True Lovers Knot United,” which also disguises Jacobite sentiment through the story of Arabella’s unsuccessful elopement.  These political ballads were, as McDowell describes, a “genre of ‘the people,’” but they also provided women with a means of money that could lead to legal danger.

While no characters are arrested in Love in Excess, Haywood’s conceptualization of criminal love shapes character behavior as crimes of passion.  Ultimately, “crimes of passion” often refer to violent criminal acts inspired by a sudden strong emotional response.  Although we stereotypically expect that strong response to be anger or hatred, it is possible to consider intense love as fuel for impulsive actions.  Haywood’s reflection of eighteenth-century gender expectations within Love in Excess further examines changes in the construct of gender, as well as how the different genders hold power.

Similar to female ballad-singers, the written word is a powerful tool for expressing emotional unrest in Love in Excess.  The novel opens with a description of Alovysa as “[suffering] her self to be agitated almost to madness between the two extremes of love and indignation” (Haywood 39).  The use of “madness” lends weight to how passionate emotions ultimately consume Alovysa.  Her obsession with D’elmont not only leads to her “rival” Amena’s life-long banishment to a monastery but also a lack of trust in her marriage, emotional suffering, and her untimely death.  Alovysa uses her skills in writing and speaking to act on her passion.  For example, when she realizes that D’elmont is pursuing Amena, Alovysa does not hesitate to write to him anonymously:  “you cannot without a manifest contradiction to its will, and an irreparable injury to your self, make a present of that heart to Amena, when one, of at least an equal beauty, and far superior in every other consideration, would sacrifice all to purchase the glorious trophy” (45).  Her strategic choice of placing D’elmont as a “trophy” flatters him as he realizes that he has more than one admirer.  Furthermore, despite being close friends with Amena, Alovysa does not consider whether her actions will hurt Amena when she writes that she believes herself to be “far superior.”  Tiffany Potter has observed that “Haywood undergoes a process of mastering this language of passion and claiming it for women as a creative, powerful, production value” (Potter 171).  Alovysa’s clever turns of phrase in her anonymous letters allow her to manipulate the situation to secure her ultimate desires.  Her willingness to do what she believes to be necessary in that moment–including sacrificing the wellbeing of her friend–assists in fulfilling her emotional needs.  Potter investigates Alovysa’s cunning use of language to act on her passion through an understanding of knowledge as power.  In the scene between Alovysa and the Baron, she is seeking information that only the Baron can tell her, while he wants sexual consent.  Potter notes that Alovysa’s “agency here comes from the ability she is granted by Haywood to empower herself through playing both sides of her culture’s gendered constructions of language as she uses the language of desire, seduction, and adultery” (171-172). Alovysa’s use of written and spoken language allows her to gain the information and future she desires.  Despite the emotional consequences of her actions, her use of language demonstrates her strength and willingness to act on her love for D’elmont.

Haywood’s discussion of crimes of passion further addresses the gender divide in the treatment of rejection and sins of the body through Melantha and Ciamara.  The two women cannot physically restrain themselves from acting on their lust for D’elmont.  At first Melantha tries to pursue the Count.  However, after overhearing a conversation between the Count and her brother, Melantha becomes uneasy.  She knows of her brother’s feelings for Alovysa, but the new information of the Count’s love for Melliora leads to her frustration with the men’s behavior.  However, Melantha does not become dissuaded by this realization.  Instead, she uses this information to her advantage to trick D’elmont to sleep with her and become pregnant.  Rather than perform her gender as perhaps expected, she decides to take what she desires.  When her crime of seduction is revealed, she is referred to by her brother as “that wicked woman” and as “deceitful” (Haywood 144).  He is further angered by her “scandal” as well as what he sees as the betrayal of the family name, and he threatens to “stab [her] here in this scene of guilt,” an act prevented by D’elmont (144).  Although Melantha is frightened that her brother will follow through on the threat, she argues:  “neither am I guilty of any crime.  I was vext indeed to be made a property of, and changed beds with Melliora for a little innocent revenge; for I always designed to discover my self to the Count time enough to prevent mischief” (145).  Her word choice of “revenge” implies that she has become angered by the way that the men have been treating her.  Melantha takes control of what power she can have through the use of her body.  Yet, while it is perhaps socially accepted that the men pursue women how they please, the gendered response to a woman acting on her desire is a reaction asserting that she is something like a criminal.

In comparison to Melantha, Ciamara’s seduction not only fails but also further exacerbates the difference in gendered sins of the body.  Ciamara tries to act on her lust for D’elmont by disrobing for him, kissing him, and guiding his hands to her body, all to persuade him to be with her (225).  Unfortunately, for Ciamara, D’elmont is not convinced.  However, before rejecting Ciamara, he takes a moment to enjoy her body.  His actions are explained away as follows:  “he was still a man! and, ‘tis not to be thought strange if to the force of such united temptations, nature and modesty a little yielded . . . her behavior having extinguished all his respect, he gave his hands and eyes a full enjoyment of all those charms” (225).  This acceptance of D’elmont’s behavior is a stark difference from earlier in the novel, when he struggled to express the pain of his passion for Melliora.  Multiple instances depict D’elmont as attempting physically to force himself onto Melliora, and these acts drive her to prevent their physical connection by stuffing the lock of her bedroom with torn pieces of her corset.  Yet, in comparison to Ciamara, while it is inappropriate for a woman physically to act on her desires, the novel shows that it is ostensibly fully understandable for a man to do so.

Crime in eighteenth-century England was often understood to be driven by specific traits attributed to men and women.  While men were expected physically to act on their aggression and desires, women responded to threats to their emotional and physical needs.  Female crime in the eighteenth century was thoroughly addressed by popular fiction writers to much acclaim.  Haywood’s criminalization of love makes way for a larger examination of patriarchal institutions.  Her use of the written word as a means to establish control and her discussion of the unequal treatment of rejection and seduction show how gender expectations shaped responses to how individuals adhered or disrupted gender performance.

Works Cited

Fulford, Tim.  “Fallen Ladies and Cruel Mothers:  Ballad Singers and Ballad Heroines in the Eighteenth Century.”  The Eighteenth Century 47.2 (2006):  309-329.

“Gender in the Proceedings.”  Old Bailey Online. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Gender.jsp. Accessed 15 March 2019.

Haywood, Eliza.  Love in Excess.  Ed. David Oakleaf.  Peterborough:  Broadview Press, 2000.

“Mary Clarke.”  Old Bailey Online.  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17190408-2-off9&div=t17190408-2#highlight.  Accessed 9 April 2019.

“Mary Wilson.”  Old Bailey Online.  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17190408-30-off151&div=t17190408-30#highlight.  Accessed 9 April 2019.

McDowell, Paula.  “‘The Manufacture and Lingua-facture of Ballad-Making’:  Broadside Ballads in Long Eighteenth-Century Ballad Discourse.”  The Eighteenth Century 47.2 (2006):  151-178.

Miller, Branford P.  “Eighteenth-Century Views of the Ballad.”  Western Folklore 9.2 (1950):  124-135.

Potter, Tiffany.  “The Language of Feminised Sexuality:  Gendered Voice in Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess and Fantomina.”  Women’s Writing 10.1 (2003):  169-186.

Smith, Chloe Wigston.  Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel.  Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013.

“The Lovers Knot United.”  English Broadside Ballad Archive.  http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32691/xml.  Accessed 20 April 2019.

“Urphane Mackhoule.”  Old Bailey Online.  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17190708-18-off93&div=t17190708-18#highlight.  Accessed 9 April 2019.

The Boy Gangs of London

The Boy Gangs of London

The prevalence of boy gangs on London streets has been famously preserved for us in literature by Daniel Defoe’s 1722 depiction of bands of roving boys and by Charles Dickens’s 1838 creation of Fagin’s network of pickpockets in Oliver Twist. But what of the real boy gangs from the period that caught the attention of these novelists?  Where are they childlike?  Or hardened adult-like criminals?  This is the story of one such gang operating in eighteenth-century London.

She-Pirates: Early Eighteenth-Century Fantasy and Reality

She-Pirates: Early Eighteenth-Century Fantasy and Reality

“The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates” provides a vivid portrayal of she-pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny as crossdressing women seafarers.

“No less than High Treason”: Libel and Sensationalism in the Careers of Jacobite Periodicalists George Flint and Isaac Dalton

“No less than High Treason”: Libel and Sensationalism in the Careers of Jacobite Periodicalists George Flint and Isaac Dalton

The early eighteenth-century British press was a hotbed for propaganda wars:  in the midst of the Succession Crisis, both Whig and Tory writers in London kept their fingers on the pulse of foreign affairs, war, and national politics. 

She-Pirates: Early Eighteenth-Century Fantasy and Reality

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John Massey Wright, 1777–1866, British. Pirates (undated). Watercolor with graphite on medium, slightly textured, cream wove paper. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

In “The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and Other Pirates” published in 1721, witnesses have testified that when the she-pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny “saw any Vessel, gave Chase, or Attacked, they wore Men’s Cloaths; and, at other Times, they wore Women’s Cloaths” (28).  While this testimony proves that both female criminals were crossdressing on board the pirate sloop, it reveals an interesting characteristic that marked these two women seafarers different from their female cohort in the early eighteenth century:  they were not interested in concealing their feminine identity at all.  If this is true, one cannot help but wonder why Mary Read and Anne Bonny would even consider crossdressing when they had the freedom to choose what they would wear in the first place.  Through analyzing the trial record of the said she-pirates and Captain Charles Johnson’s A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates, I argue that the crossdressing she-pirate was not just a literary fantasy but a possible identity that women could choose to adopt because of the unique social understanding of identity in early eighteenth-century society.

To figure out why Mary Read and Anne Bonny would want to cross-dress as pirates, we should begin by knowing that identity was not considered as “naturally” gendered in the early eighteenth century.  Therefore, the she-pirates’ crossdressing might not seem as uncommon an act as it is today.  According to Dror Wahrman, “[a]lthough expectations of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ were generally well defined, contemporaries did not perceive them as necessarily pinning down each and every individual” (40).  That is to say, “delineations of maleness and femaleness [. . .] are perceptual and relational rather than natural or self-generated” (Dugaw “Female Sailors Bold” 44).  In early eighteenth-century society, a biological male could be delicate and sentimental while a biological female did not have to be maternal and caring.  These seemingly “unnatural” identities would be met “with resignation, tolerance, or sometimes even appreciation” (Wahrman 40).  From this perspective, the she-pirates’ crossdressing should not be regarded as a serious transgression because they lived in a society that allowed more freedom in terms of gender and identity.  Although they would be expected to appear more feminine, femininity was by no means the only quality they could use to present themselves.

Yet Mary Read and Anne Bonny’s crossdressing denotes more than gender.  Indeed, the clothes they wore shaped the role they were playing.  As a letter in a 1711 issue of the Spectator notes, “People dress themselves in what they have a Mind to be, and not what they are fit for” (Addison and Steele 45).  Although the author was referring to his experience going to a masquerade, Dianne Dugaw reminds us that the eighteenth century was a period “in which pervasive metaphors of masquerading conditioned the very terms in which people thought and behaved” (Warrior Women 132).  Adopting a different identity was not a privilege for one attending masquerades, acting on the stage, or appearing in literary works—people would don on a different persona even in their daily lives by wearing different clothes.  This prompted Maximillian E. Novak to call the period “The Age of Disguise” (7), for one’s clothes, as Terry Castle indicates, “spoke symbolically of the human being beneath its folds” (55).  Early eighteenth-century society is unique for its belief that clothes are used “to make identity” (Wahrman 178, italics original).  Like going to a masquerade, a contemporary could alter their appearance and begin performing the role that their clothes designated.  There existed the possibility for one to have multiple identities instead of just one fixed persona.  This cultural belief thus provides the ground for women to wear a pirate’s outfit and begin acting as one.

Although the pirate identity was an option for women in the early eighteenth century, the pirate community was, unsurprisingly, not particularly friendly to women.  Captain Bartho Roberts, who was active at the beginning of the eighteenth century, clearly states in his often-quoted pirate code that “[n]o boy or woman [is] to be allowed amongst them [the pirates]” (Johnson 183).  On speculating why women would cross-dress to be soldiers in contemporary ballads, Dugaw also notes that if a single woman is undisguised in the predominantly male environment, she “was subject to harassment and violence” (Dugaw, Warrior Women 130).

Furthermore, Frederick Burwick and Manushag N. Powell have noted that pirates “largely regarded women or indeed any sexual attachments at sea as a perilous distraction” (102); therefore, they avoided having them on board as much as they could.  While Marcus Rediker believes that Captain Roberts was “more straitlaced than most pirate captains” (9), it should be evident that the pirate profession was predominantly masculine and potentially dangerous to women.  Therefore, besides trying to perform the role of a pirate, another possible and practical reason for Mary Read and Anne Bonny to disguise themselves was that crossdressing would carve out a safe space for them to blend in the community that was predominantly masculine.

If we examine the descriptions of the she-pirates in the trial record, we can recognize that crossdressing certainly enabled Mary Read and Anne Bonny to mingle with the masculine pirate community.  According to a captive on the sloop, Mary Read and Ann Bonny “wore Mens Jackets, and long Trouzers, and Handkerchiefs tied about their Heads; and each of them had a Machet and Pistol in their Hands” (“The Tryals” 27).  Their outfits were obviously masculine, and the weapons in their hands enhanced their image as aggressive outlaws.  Additionally, other witnesses also reported that they have heard the she-pirates cursing and swearing, which further distanced them from the delicate feminine identity.  The testimony thus illustrates Dugaw’s observation that a woman disguised as a man “could move about the same world with safety and freedom” (Warrior Women 130).  As the trial record indicates, the female-pirates were “hand[ing] Gun-powder to the Men” and “very ready and willing to do any Thing on Board” (“The Tryals” 28).  While dressing up as pirates, Mary Read and Anne Bonny were clearly not distractions to the crew but part of the crew that made pirating possible.  They were not particularly different from the rest of the crew.

A General History adds more to the function of crossdressing for the she-pirates by demonstrating that each has successfully dealt with hardships in their lives through crossdressing.  Dugaw suggests that two of the common reasons women would cross-dress in contemporary ballads were pursuing “true love” and “breaking out of custodial confinement” (Warrior Women 130, 135).  Johnson’s account shows much reminiscence of these reasons.  His version of Mary Read, as a newborn baby, was dressed and raised as a boy to pass for her deceased brother so that “the supposed grandmother should allow a crown a week for its maintenance” (Johnson 131).  Similarly, his Anne Bonny, being an illegitimate child, had to be “put into breeches as a boy” before her biological father could take her home to live with him (Johnson 139).  After failing to divorce her husband, Anne Bonny “consented to elope with him [Calico Rackam], and go to sea with Rackam in man’s clothes” (Johnson 140).  With these episodes of the she-pirates’ early lives, A General History further supports the idea that gender identity can be constructed in these ways during the period.

While Johnson’s narrative successfully adds spice to the story, the dramatic depiction inevitably makes the account seem more fanciful than real.  As David Cordingly indicates, a reason that made Mary Read and Anne Bonny so popular is that they “were the only women pirates of the great age of piracy that we know anything about” (59).  However, besides a few brief accounts, our knowledge of them mainly comes from “The Tryals” and A General History.  While most scholars would deem the trial record somewhat credible, there are concerns about Johnson’s work, for its content cannot be cross-checked and the author is still somewhat of a mystery.  A comparison of the two could also reveal gaps in the history.

Indeed, one telling difference is that A General History seems to suggest that a cross-dressed identity only works for a specific occasion, which is conventional in contemporary literary depictions of women crossdressers.  As Dugaw notes, disguised heroines in ballads “do not remain at sea or in camp,” for they “almost always bring about the disclosure of the disguise and a ‘return’ to ‘normal’” (Warrior Women 155).  Thus, in Johnson’s account, we can find that by crossdressing Mary Read lets the comrade she loves “discover her sex,” and she is immediately recognized by him as “a mistress solely to himself” and a woman he would court “for a wife” (Johnson 132).  As soon as the war is over, the two “bought woman’s apparel for her, [. . .] and were publicly married” (Johnson 132).  When she reveals her feminine identity, she abandons the borrowed identity for good.  While it is true that Mary Read crossed-dresses as a soldier later in the narrative, it happens after her husband dies, and she joins a different regiment.  She could not resume her previous persona.

It is also interesting to note that the crossdressing patterns for Mary Read and Anne Bonny are highly similar and formulaic in A General History.  They were both illegitimate baby girls who were raised as little boys.  As they grew up, they resumed their feminine identities to get married.  Upon facing a critical challenge in life, both cross-dressed again to become pirates who eventually pleaded after being sentenced to die.  An identity is never recycled—at least not in the same context.  Johnson’s account thus seems to be following the contemporary literary convention that favored the “return” of the crossdressers, which seems to imply that a she-pirate would eventually return to “normal.”

However, this “return” motif is nowhere to be found in the trial records.  As the witnesses clearly stated, Mary Read and Anne Bonny were able to don and shed their pirate identities in order to suit their needs.  When they were performing their pirate duties, they wore men’s clothes; when they were off duty, they had the option of wearing women’s clothes.  This not only reflects the ideas that the pirate as an identity can be borrowed by changing clothing but also demonstrates that it is an identity that women could assume and resume without creating much fuss.  The fact that Calico Rackham’s crew knew that Mary Read and Anne Bonny were women and continued to work with them as their comrade suggests that the she-pirate was not a mere literary construction—it was something like an acceptable persona for women in the early eighteenth century.  Mary Read and Anne Bonny pleaded their respective cases not because their pirate identity was incompatible with reality reality but because it was a practical decision that would prolong their lives.

It is true that we do not have many records of she-pirates and that the case of Mary Read and Anne Bonny does not represent the whole picture of she-pirates in the early eighteenth century.  Yet the fact that they were rarely mentioned does not mean that they were not an option.  As both “The Tryals” and A General History demonstrate, women could cross-dress to present and perform different identities.  “The Age of Disguise” thus allowed women like Mary Read and Anne Bonny the freedom to become pirates not only in the realm of imagination but also on board Calico Rackam’s pirate sloop.  Thus, she-pirates should not be regarded as a female fantasy—at least not in the early eighteenth century when Mary Read and Anne Bonny were freely expressing themselves while sailing under the black flag.

Works Cited

Addison, Joseph, and Richard Steele.  The Spectator.  Edited by Gregory Smith.  J. M. Dent, 1907.  Hathi Trust, hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015050175952.

Burwick, Frederick, and Manushag N. Powell.  British Pirates in Print and Performance.  Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Castle, Terry.  Masquerade and Civilization:  The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction.  Stanford:  Stanford UP, 1986.

Cordingly, David.  Under the Black Flag:  The Romance and the Reality of Life among the Pirates.  New York:  Harcourt Brace, 1995.

Dugaw, Dianne.  “Female Sailors Bold:  Transvestite Heroines and the Markers of Gender and Class.”  Iron Men, Wooden Women:  Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700- 1920.  Ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.  34-54.

—.  Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850.  Chicago:  U of Chicago P, 1996.

Johnson, Charles.  A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates.  Ed. by Arthur L. Hayward, 1926.  New York:  Routledge, 1955.

Novak, Maximillian E.  “Introduction.”  English Literature in the Age of Disguise.  Ed. Maximillian E. Novak.  Berkeley:  U of California P, 1977.  1-14.

Rediker, Marcus.  “Liberty beneath the Jolly Roger:  The Lives of Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Pirates.”  Iron Men, Wooden Women:  Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700- 1920.  Ed.  Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.  1- 33.

“The Tryals of Captain John Rackam, and Other Pirates (1721).”  British Piracy in the Golden Age:  History and Interpretation, 1660-1730.  Ed. Joel H. Baer.  Vol. 3.  London:  Pickering & Chatto, 2007.  1-66.

Wahrman, Dror.  The Making of the Modern Self.  New Haven:  Yale UP, 2004.

“No less than High Treason”: Libel and Sensationalism in the Careers of Jacobite Periodicalists George Flint and Isaac Dalton

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Unknown artist after Thomas Malton the Younger, 1748–1804, British. Newgate (1799). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

The early eighteenth-century British press was a hotbed for propaganda wars:  in the midst of the Succession Crisis, both Whig and Tory writers in London kept their fingers on the pulse of foreign affairs, war, and national politics.  Renowned writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele published on local goings-on, religion, and literature in their notably Whig periodicals, The Spectator and The Tatler.  Henry Fielding satirized Jacobites after the Rebellion of 1745 in The Jacobite’s Journal.  Though far less popular, the pro-Tory and pro-Jacobite press was booming, as well.  One pair of British periodicalists that quietly rose to notoriety was duo George Flint and Isaac Dalton, who published a series of treasonous Jacobite journals from 1715 to 1717.  Weekly Remarks and Political Reflections, Upon the Most Material News Foreign and Domestick ran from 1715 to 1716 and landed Flint, its author, in Newgate Prison after he was arrested in July, 1716 for seditious libel.  He continued to write and have his periodicals published, though, and produced Robin’s Last Shift in 1716, which became The Shift Shifted later that year, and Shift’s Last Shift in 1717 as it attempted to outrun further government censorship.  Dalton, his printer, was arrested and imprisoned four separate times for offences to the crown.  Though their individual timelines are fascinating by definition, it is also worth investigating Flint and Dalton’s popularity and skill as periodicalists.  After the first arrests, Flint began to keep a log of their prison experiences, as well as the subsequent involvement and arrests of their family members, which proved quite popular with readers.  Through their persistence and command of pathos, Dalton and Flint’s periodicals provided both strength and exposure to the Jacobite movement in a time of unmatched government suppression.

Flint first published Weekly Remarks on December 3, 1715—just months after the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland and northern England, and only days before the Pretender himself would land on Scottish soil.  For years, tensions had been brewing between the Whigs, who supported the Hanoverian ascendancy to the British throne, and the Jacobites, who supported the Stuart line of succession and were planning to take immediate action.  With James II still in France, the Earl of Mar called a war meeting in Braemar, Scotland, to discuss plans for the rebellion.  In the fall of 1715, the Jacobites failed to capture Edinburgh Castle, but were successful in taking Inverness, Castle Gordon, Dundee, and Perth—“virtually the whole of Scotland” (Sinclair-Stevenson 96).  However, both the Scottish and English Jacobite forces failed to make an impact against the government armies in October when they fell in both the battles of Sheriffmuir and of Preston.  Shortly after, James sailed from France to Scotland; the December 24 edition of Weekly Remarks reports “this Day or Two, That the Pretender is Landed,” and that a number of Londoners were heard singing Jacobite ballads in the streets (Weekly Remarks, 4: 23-24).  Not long after arriving, however, James escaped from Scotland before the government began to severely persecute the Jacobites.

In his introduction to the first installment of Weekly Remarks, Flint claims the publication would be the source of “a pretty clear and impartial Judgement” (Weekly Remarks, 1: 1).  Each Saturday, the journal printed the news of a number of countries (like Spain, Italy, Germany, and Great Britain) and paired entries with a “Remarks” section, in which the author editorialized on that week’s foreign affairs.  For this Flint was arrested and tried in the summer of 1716:  the Old Bailey criminal court record states he “confess’d he was concern’d in writing the said Libel with another Person, which was to be of a different Nature from any yet publish’d:  That the Prisoner was seen to write some Part of the said Paper.  That it came from his own Hands to the Press.  And that he had own’d to my Lord Townshend and others, he wrote it for his Bread” (“Trial of George Flint”).  Though he had been arrested and imprisoned earlier that year for printing Robin’s Last Shift,I Dalton was again indicted and imprisoned alongside Flint; he was found guilty of cursing King George and attempting to pay prison guards to drink to the Pretender’s health.  He was also charged with seditious libel for printing Weekly Remarks, but “the Evidence failing in fixing that particularly, for which he was cried, upon the Prisoner, he was acquitted” (“Trial of Isaac Dalton” July, 1716).

Dalton would be found guilty of two more crimes related to his Jacobitical printing activities:  in November of 1716, he was charged with seditious libel for printing The Shift Shifted.  In May of 1717, he was again found guilty of libel—this time for printing a pamphlet (titled “Advise to the Freeholders of England”) a number of years previous to his work with Flint.II  This resulted in two additional imprisonments to be served following his July sentence of one year at Newgate, as well as fines to be paid and a day spent in the pillory.  In the article “Liberty and Libel:  Government and the Press during the Succession Crisis in Britain, 1712-1716,” P. B. J. Hyland describes this punishment as “a symbol of the ministry’s triumph, and perhaps to avenge its earlier humiliation” (Hyland 881).  But the Weekly Remarks would not be put down so quietly, no matter the efforts the government took to silence Flint and Dalton.  Through their own writing (before that privilege was taken away) and the interference run by family members, they continued to publish their periodicals, condemning the treatment of prisoners at Newgate and the overall actions of the government with a renewed passion.  One excerpt from the August 18, 1716, edition of The Shift Shifted describes Flint’s imprisonment as unthinkable and cruel.  As they starved and endured overly cramped quarters, the inmates were punished for attempting to share their rations with one another.  Flint himself “contracted another cruel Sickness,” and his wife was soon also sent to prison for helping publish The Shift Shifted (The Shift Shifted, 16:94).  The account, a dramatic exercise in pity and shock, reads,

“Yet his Wife for endeavouring to help her Husband, (which most think to be a Wive’s Duty) and in a way which she could not think unlawful, is also close imprison’d, and cannot be let out upon Bail, tho’ the Husband (beside the Bail) offers to take upon himself whatsoever his Wife can be charg’d with.  Now one would think her Crime could be no less than High Treason, and at the same time it is alledged to be no more than Ordering the Carriage of a few News-Papers.”  (The Shift Shifted, 16:94)

Neither man was stranger to this kind of rhetorical appeal.  In remarking on the Battle of Sheriffmuir in the December 3, 1715, edition of Weekly Remarks, Flint describes the horrors seen by the Jacobite soldiers on the battlefield:  they stood “like Motionless Statues, seeing their Friends cut to pieces by one third of their Number” (Weekly Remarks 1:5).  But perhaps the most provocative account Dalton and Flint provide is another entry in the August 18 edition of The Shift Shifted, following Dalton’s July arrest.  In an sensationally dramatized fashion, it details the subsequent arrest of Dalton’s sister, Mary, for continuing to print the treasonous periodicals after Flint and Dalton were arrested:

“To do Good and Suffer Evil, is to act a Royal Part; and therefore I am not a little pleas’d that it is faln to my Share, to undergo so much Evil for endeavouring to do good to my Country … However, to imprison a Man for a Fancy, tho’ he be thereby ruin’d, we wave that as a Trifle, a Nothing to Moloch.  But to take his young Maiden Sister only for happening to receive a little Money for him; for this, I say, to cram her into a Messenger’s, and thence bring her directly to the Bar, all overwhelm’d with Tears and Confusion, without a Moment’s Preparation for her Tryal, and there after a Fine of 30 Marks, appoint the beautiful young modest Maiden to remain confin’d for a Twelvemonth in a loathsome Gaol, conversing with the Strums of Newgate.  Suppose she have innocently assisted her Brother in his Distress, does that (call it a crime) come up to this Punishment?  Was ever such a Virgin ever so unmercifully expos’d for such a Crime.”  (The Shift Shifted, 16:94)

As McDowell asserts in The Women of Grub Street:  Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730, Dalton was clearly crafting his words in an entirely gendered way to gain sympathy from the public for his and his sister’s situation:  “Isaac Dalton represented [Mary] as a sentimental heroine in the merciless clutches of an oppressive ministry … as a genteel young lady” who ultimately “became a martyr to the government” (McDowell 108-109).  And it worked.  Randall McGowen notes that the pillory “inflicted humiliation and brought notoriety to an offender, at least as much as physical suffering” (McGowen 123).  But the crowd that assembled the day Dalton was pilloried at Newgate did not curse at him or throw rotten tomatoes his way; they cheered him on and collected money for him to pay his fines instead (Hyland 881-882).

Flint and Dalton’s powerful publications accomplished what the English government wanted to avoid at all costs.  As Kathleen Wilson argues in “Inventing Revolution:  1688 and Eighteenth-Century Popular Politics,” they and other Jacobite journalists had become successful critics of Whig ideology, penning vivid editorials on the party’s corruption and abuse of power.  They believed “the government was a trust, based on popular consent, in which people of all ranks had residual rights separate from those of their representatives.  These included the rights to a free press, to lawful assembly, and to canvass public affairs and protest against bad governments and bad laws” (Wilson 372).  When those rights were infringed upon, Flint and Dalton were quick to remark on it in their writing, and their subsequent arrests only bolstered the frenzied reports featured in their periodicals.  They had amassed a following—both among fellow Jacobites, and among the pro-government Whig newspapers that continuously reported on their misdeeds and run-ins with the law.  What started out as an underground effort to undermine the politics of their enemies quickly became an intense and public battle that gave the Jacobite movement new exposure in London.  In using descriptive storytelling, interrogating moral and ethical norms, and appealing to the sympathies of their audience, Flint and Dalton brought the Jacobite movement to the forefront of English politics by changing the government’s own game.

Notes

I.  See both the March 17 and 31, 1716 editions of James Read’s The Weekly Journal, Or, British Gazetteer, Being the Freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick for briefs on Dalton’s original arrest.

II.  See both the November, 1716 and May, 1717 trials of Isaac Dalton on the Old Bailey Proceedings Online.

Works Cited

Flint, George.  “Great Britain.”  The Shift Shifted, Or, Weekly Remarks and Political Reflections, Upon the Most Material News Foreign and Domestick.  August 18, 1716.

—.  “Great Britain.”  Weekly Remarks and Political Reflections, Upon the Most Material News Foreign and Domestick.  December 24, 1715.

—.  “Introduction.”  Weekly Remarks and Political Reflections, Upon the Most Material News Foreign and Domestick.  December 3, 1715.

Hyland, P. B. J. “Liberty and Libel:  Government and the Press during the Succession Crisis in Britain, 1712-1716.”  The English Historical Review 101.401 (1986):  863-888.  JSTOR.

McDowell, Paula.  “‘To Run Oneself Into Danger’:  Women and the Politics of Opposition in the London Book Trade.”  The Women of Grub Street:  Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678-1730.  Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1998.  1-120.

McGowan, Randall.  “From Pillory to Gallows:  The Punishment of Forgery in the Age of the Financial Revolution.”  Past & Present 165 (1999):  107-140.  JSTOR.

Read, James. “Great Britain.”  The Weekly Journal, Or, British Gazetteer, Being the Freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick.  March 17, 1716.

—.  “Great Britain.”  The Weekly Journal, Or, British Gazetteer, Being the Freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick.  March 31, 1716.

Sinclair-Stevenson, Christopher.  Inglorious Rebellion:  The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1715, and 1719.  New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1971.

“Trial of George Flint, July 1716 (t17160712-5).” Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  Accessed May 1, 2019.  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org.

“Trial of Isaac Dalton, July 1716 (t17160712-4).”  Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  Accessed May 1, 2019. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org.

“Trial of Isaac Dalton, November 1716 (t17161105-81).”  Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  Accessed 1 May, 2019.  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org.

“Trial of Isaac Dalton, May 1717, (t17170501-54).”  Old Bailey Proceedings Online.  Accessed May 1, 2019. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org.