Past Crime: Pre-nineteenth Century
Representations of Criminality
Lee Horsley
Spraggs, Outlaws and Highwaymen Dionne and Mentz (eds), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England
In the near future, Crimeculture will be launching a new section dealing with representations of criminality from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. This 'step backwards' is in keeping with one of the most important steps forward in the contemporary academic study of crime, that is, the detailed exploration of the great mass of pre-19th century 'true crime' narratives and literary fictions dealing with the lives of criminal transgressors - outlaws, highwaymen, confidence tricksters, female rogues, gang leaders and murderers. Increasingly, literary scholars, historians and cultural critics have become engaged in analyzing the historical records, trial reports, criminal biographies, pamphlets, ballads, plays and stories that have made these marginal men and women central to the popular imagination. How have the cultural meanings of these transgressive figures been established? How have images of the rogue functioned to define urban identities? Have specific criminal figures been represented in conformity to long-established stereotypes? Or have the images and the stories of the outlaw figure undergone major transformations over time? Amongst them, the studies briefly reviewed here cover eight centuries of criminal narrative, raising questions, establishing patterns and connections, and clarifying (in Jonathan Dollimore's phrase) the ways in which 'those at the periphery of society often figure obsessively for those at its centre'.
Gillian Spraggs' Outlaws and Highwaymen: The Cult of the Robber in England from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (Pimlico, 2001) itself covers eight centuries and persuasively argues the case for the existence of a distinctively English 'cult of the robber', tracing the tradition from the Medieval outlaw to such famous eighteenth-century highwaymen as Dick Turpin.
In the early part of her study, Spraggs provides a particularly detailed exploration of the Robin Hood tradition, following the figure of the 'open-hearted highwayman' through to the eighteenth century. She explores both the literature that sustained the myth and the historical reality of the 'knights of the road'. Did they indeed conduct themselves in the manner of Robin Hood? Spraggs observes that 'it is sad, but hardly surprising' to find that there are no authenticated instances of actual robbers distributing their booty to people in need: although there are instances of compassion and generosity (an obscure eighteenth-century robber, Thomas Easter, for example, returning the four shillings he has stolen from a poor blacksmith and giving him 'another Shilling to drink our Healths') we should, she argues, be wary about seeing highwaymen as social radicals: 'it was an individualist, not a Utopian or collective dream.'
Equally fascinating is her discussion of class stereotypes and criminal conduct - of the nostalgia, for example, for a time when 'all robbers were gentlemen' rather than ruined tradesmen or alienated workmen. Examining the idea of the 'courteous' robber, Spraggs notes the quite astonishingly good manners of those eighteenth-century highwaymen influenced by the period's conception of 'politeness' not as exaggerated formality but as behaviour designed to ease every social situation by showing people respect and consideration - as Spragg wryly comments, a challenging task for a robber ('To rob with some ceremony, like Robin Hood, is one thing; to rob in a way that is unassuming and aims to put people at their ease is another matter entirely.').
Outlaws and Highwaymen is a patient and scholarly but also an exceptionally lively, often witty analysis of the evolution of the highwayman in the modern imagination. Spraggs has also supplemented her study with an excellent 'Outlaws and Highwaymen' website, which, amongst other things, contains street ballads, songs, 'merry tales', satires, letters and other primary material not available elsewhere.
Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz (editors), in Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2004), present a cross-disciplinary collection of new and recent essays on the figure of the rogue in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Crime narratives, more than any other popular form of literature, have been caught up in the confusions and interrelationships between life and literature. This is, in every period, manifest in our uncertainty about the truth (or otherwise) of purportedly historical accounts of criminal activity: what is accurate representation and what invention and stereotype? It is evident as well in the rapidity with which new criminal exploits are incorporated into literary representations (as in the work of Fielding and Defoe, for example) and by the equal speed with which literary representations of crime find their way back into the self-representations of actual criminals.
Dionne and Mentz, in their introduction to Rogues and Early Modern Culture, see the studies of roguery in their collection as blurring the boundaries between the historical and the literary, objective and subjective understandings, public paranoia and private experience, revealing 'a complex back-and-forth relationship' between historical rogues and such 'authors-constructed-as-rogues' as Robert Greene and Thomas Dekker. 'The fact-or-fiction paradigm,' they argue, 'becomes finally a focalizing aporia: because the rogue is, inescapably, both fact and fiction…'
Another of the widely relevant themes central to this collection of essays is the often contradictory cultural meanings attached to the criminal figure. There has been, and continues to be, a link between the formation of bourgeois identity and the underworld: indeed, this relationship between conventional society and the outsider, 'its fugitive other', can be seen as a pervasive binary in Western culture, with its obsessive interest in anti-heroes and outlaw identities. Dionne and Mentz stress the ambivalence of our attitudes towards such figures - 'the double bind of sympathy and disgust, admiration and fear' - and individual essays explore the roots of this cultural fascination in early modern texts that were instrumental in constructing the social imaginary of their readers. The rogue, they suggest, is both a parallel and a critique of 'in-law culture': with his adaptability, mobility, assumption of disguises and aliases, and drive towards status, he is the prototypical citizen of modern urban capitalism, inverting respectable culture and simultaneously mirroring its greed, corruption and cynicism.
Hal Gladfelder's Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century England: Beyond the Law (The Johns Hopkins Press, 2001) is a clear, scholarly, wide-ranging study, demonstrating the huge influence of popular discourses of criminality - their entanglement with everyday life, the influence of the attitudes towards violence and transgression contained in such narratives, and their role in the formation the emerging novel. The 'store of figures, life histories, and dramatic incidents' that they contained helped to shape the work of Defoe (Moll Flanders, Colonel Jack, and Roxana), Fielding (especially Amelia) and, later in the century, Godwin's Caleb Williams. In support of his analysis of the shaping of the early novel, Gladfelder maps the 'complex and heterogeneous network of criminal discourses', taking in late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts like Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveler and John Reynolds' The Triumph of God's Revenge, against the Crying, and Execrable Sinne of Murther as well as surveying the various genres of crime narrative (trial reports, gallows speech, criminal biographies), exploring their responses to transgression and their role as 'a locus for moral and ideological contestation'.
Other critics, of course, have examined the origins of the English novel in criminal discourse - for example, John Richetti, in Popular Fiction Before Richardson, and Lincoln Faller in Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography. But Gladfelder challenges their conceptions of the mythic structuring and signifying of such discourse, questioning its function in bolstering the institutions of authority and in containing the rebellious, disruptive energies of criminality. He instead maintains that what we see in criminal narratives is the foregrounding of circumstantial detail over pattern. Moralising protestations notwithstanding, such discourse subversively 'smuggles in' vivid, concrete, often problematic material. It is in this emphasis on contradictory elements not easily harmonized or recontained that Gladfelder's argument relates most interestingly to the analyses developed in the studies reviewed above: the disturbing tensions that emerge are not readily resolved, and 'whatever the reassuring claims of the pamphlets' authors, the criminals whose lives were told over and over most insistently remained troubling even after the settling of accounts.'
Copyright © 2005 by Lee Horsley
