This collection for The 18th-Century Common curates a series of short public humanities essays on all aspects of criminality. The eighteenth century saw increasing attention on criminal behavior, on those who violated the law, and on the array of potential consequences for engaging in crime. Overflowing jails led to creative incarceration solutions such as the use of decommissioned ships (termed “prison hulks”) to house inmates. Executions were a public spectacle. Highwaymen were romanticized as anti-heroes. The brutal realities of hard labor–including beating hemp or dredging the Thames—were featured in lurid accounts. Increased media attention led to public fears of rampant criminal behavior.
Essays for this collection focus on (but are not limited to) the following: accounts of crime and trials; criminal biography; representation of crime and criminals in visual, fictional, and popular culture; early attempts to develop psychological profiles of criminals and determine why criminals commit crimes; criminal women; public executions; the threat of transportation; characterizations of law enforcement; the state of prisons; vigilante justice.
This collection, which aims to give treatment to a range of critical approaches to representations of criminality, is Guest Edited by Debra Bourdeau ([email protected]).
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.
“Prompted by the Violence of her Passion”: Gendered Crime in the 18th Century and Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess
Crimes committed by females during the eighteenth century were thoroughly addressed by popular fiction writers to much acclaim. Eliza Haywood’s criminalization of love makes way for a larger examination of patriarchal institutions and interrogates the gendered nature of criminality during this period.
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
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.