The Bellman's Chant

'In no country,' wrote Sir T. Smith, a distinguished lawyer of the time, 'do malefactors go to execution more intrepidly than in England'; and assuredly, buoyed up by custom and the approval of their fellows, [they] made a brave show at the gallows. Nor was their bravery the result of a common callousness. They understood at once the humour and the delicacy of the situation....

As twelve o'clock approached--their last midnight upon earth--they would interrupt the most spirited discourse, they would check the tour of the mellowest bottle to listen to the solemn doggerel. 'All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,' groaned the Bellman of St. Sepulchre's in his duskiest voice, and they who held revel in the condemned hole prayed silence of their friends for the familiar cadences:

All you that in the condemn'd hole do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die,
Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near,
That you before th' Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent
That you may not t' eternal flames be sent;
And when St. Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls.
Past twelve o'clock!

Delivered nightly to the prisoners of Newgate

From Charles Whibley, A Book of Scoundrels (1897)

The Dick Turpin Cottage

What was I saying about glamour?

I don't doubt it's a lovely place to stay, just somewhat oddly-named; for, call me an old fusspot, but the words 'Dick Turpin' and 'warm, friendly welcome', 'advice and assistance' and 'courtesy and service' sit ill together for me:



The charm of THE DICK TURPIN COTTAGE with its many features of architectural and historic interest has been carefully preserved. You will receive a warm welcome and enjoy a high standard of accommodation. THE DICK TURPIN COTTAGE is featured in "Special Places to Stay in Britain", Awarded the top English Tourist Board quality rating- "Five Stars", De-luxe 5 Keys, and "Gold Award". Our aims are to: -

Offer a warm, friendly welcome to guests.
Ensure a high standard of accommodation, courtesy, and service.
Respond promptly and properly to any complaints or criticism.
Offer our guests all advice and assistance they require.

Allurements and Fascinations

Richard Turpin was an angry, unsuccessful butcher who became a housebreaker, a fence, a robber, a murderer and a horsethief. Though he was successfully prosecuted in York, he could have been tried in Essex, Middlesex, Kent, Leicestershire or the Cities of London and Westminster.

There was no gentility about the man.

Nevertheless, even those who should know better gloss the highway robber with sophistication. James Clavell, a 17th-century highwayman pardonned and exiled to Ireland for writing the equivalent of a public-information pamphlet exposing the tricks of his trade, called it: 'An Art, as would forever make him a Gentleman.'

Dickens, criticised for the 'criminal heroes' of his Oliver Twist, rightly pointed out that they were nothing of the sort. He had taken pains to avoid the fashion for vesting 'such characters' in 'certain allurements and fascinations': moonlit canters, embroidery, lace, jack-boots, crimson coats and ruffles.

Yes, it was 300 years ago. People wore swirly cloaks, rode horses, danced and sighed, fainted and fluttered.


Thanks, William. This is A Midnight Modern Conversation (from 1733: when Dick would have been 28). Thank Heaven for Hogarth. Without him we'd see the 18th century as all neat, ordered, polite and brushed-off - a static Thomas Gainsborough world:

Very lovely. But as posed, artificial and political an image as the airbrushed covers of Vogue or Hello. You get closer to 18th-century Man walking through Leeds City Centre on a Saturday night.

People don't really become more polite, better dressed and more lovely as you go further back into the past. This is the myth of social entropy, a Grumpy Old Men-view of the universe passed off as truth. We have always mourned a great 'Golden Age' and correspondingly always derided the Youth of Today. It seems to be human nature.

Old Crime was once True Crime, Modern Crime, Crime-next-Door. Highway robbery was about as genteel and seductive as car-jacking or street-robbery are not.

And Turpin - he was a right bastard.

Moral Duties

Writing a novel with a violent theme - more: writing a novel whose protagonist is an infamous criminal - you inevitably must consider the question of your intent.

Dick Turpin is a man who has been glamourised in quite literally every artistic form - verse, song, film, tv, art. Given that this veneer of heroism was applied even while Turpin was still alive, when there were dozens of householders and travellers to hand who could attest to his being quite otherwise, it is difficult to blame the 19th-century romancers who continued and amplified this work.

Charles Dickens was one of the first authors to consciously attempt to redress the balance. Not with regard to Turpin specifically, though in Barnaby Rudge he did include a very un-glamourous highwayman; but his aim as a novellist from the outset was to show crime and criminals in their social context and all their human ugliness - and I have very much wanted to follow his example in this matter.

It is a fine line to walk along: as soon as you begin to understand the social or psychological background to a crime, it becomes more difficult to describe it: it is detestable, but comprehensible. Some little part of it has entered into you, in your imagination, and so you feel a degree of pity even for the unpitiable and pitiless Mr. Turpin.

I have begun, in short, to feel sorry for him; and as my narrative draws ever-nearer its close, I even begin to dread having to kill him off. But I must be honest and true, which means not drawing back from showing him in his brutality. He is no hero.

As the Animals sang: "I'm just a soul whose intentions are good"... but, as Dr. Johnson would reply, that is not enough.

BOSWELL: [of Rousseau] "I don't deny, Sir, but that his novel may, perhaps, do harm; but I cannot think his intention was bad."
JOHNSON: "Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the Judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice."

Boswell's Life of Johnson

Vol. 1 1709-1776

Amsterdam redux

Should Dick have walked back from the dockside in Amsterdam, beyond Dam Square, down Herengracht and across to Spuistraat he would have walked past these two buildings:




The houses in Amsterdam didn't have numbers, instead they were identified by the type of decoration at the top of the house.

Idleness

In one of his letters to his son, the Earl of Chesterfield (a Man of Manners if ever there was one) gives what must be the first ever description of a toilet book:

I knew a gentleman, who was so good a manager of his time, that he would not even lose that small portion of it, which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets, in those moments.
He bought, for example, a common edition of Horace, of which he tore off gradually a couple of pages, carried them with him to that necessary place, read them first, and then sent them down as a sacrifice to Cloacina: this was so much time fairly gained; and I recommend you to follow his example. It is better than only doing what you cannot help doing at those moments; and it will make any book, which you shall read in that manner, very present in your mind.
Books of science, and of a grave sort, must be read with continuity; but there are very many, and even very useful ones, which may be read with advantage by snatches, and unconnectedly; such are all the good Latin poets, except Virgil in his "AEneid": and such are most of the modern poets, in which you will find many pieces worth reading, that will not take up above seven or eight minutes.
Bayle's, Moreri's, and other dictionaries, are proper books to take and shut up for the little intervals of (otherwise) idle time, that everybody has in the course of the day, between either their studies or their pleasures. Good night.

London, December 18 1747

In that sleep

Give him to swift conveyors
to bear with them,
even to the twin brethren,
Sleep and Death.

Homer: Iliad

Enjoy...

... the honey-heavy dew of slumber:

Thou hast no figures nor no fantasies

Which busy care draws in the brains of men;

Therefore thou sleep'st so sound.

William Shakespeare: Julius Cæsar

Awakenings

It was the heat on his boots that had woken him: while the rest of him still lay in shadow, the sunlight had broken through a gap in the trees to shine hotly on his legs. Dick had ridden through the night from the City to Epping Forest, where he shivered and worried through the lonely dawn, eventually dropping into a confused and anxious doze that deepened after a time into a dreamless sleep. Now, he is awake again.

He squints upward, trying to estimate the hour. The sun has passed from overhead but has not sunk far yet toward the horizon. The air is hot and still, the sky so bright and heavy that it seems to be pressing down on the leaves that shade him, parting them with its weight.

Excerpt from DICK Chapter 12: Study of Figure in a Landscape

zzzzz

Dick's a' kip after his exertions in Amsterdam and is preparing for a new life of crime in Yorkshire.