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.