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Full Description
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, widespread fear of criminal assault motivated the publication of hundreds of pamphlets tracing the lives and misdeeds of London's most notorious rogues. Turned to Account is a study that focuses on the popular genre of criminal biography, examining how it played upon and reflected English society's fears and interest in aberrant behaviour. The author has not produced a criminal history, but an intriguing distillation of some 2,000 separate narratives describing the lives, deeds, and dying words of thieves, murderers, and various scoundrels. Lincoln Faller examines ways in which ordinary Englishmen read, wrote, and presumably thought on the subject of criminal actions and character. He completes his treatment by showing how the pamphlets served to delineate the lines of socially acceptable behaviour. Faller has chosen his examples with skill and economy to produce a comprehensive and interesting work.
Contents
Preface; Part I. Turning Criminals to Account: Three Case Histories and Two Myths of Crime: 1. The highwayman: power, grace, and money at command; 2. Familiar murder: sin, death, damnation, repentance, God's grace, and salvation; Part II. Enucleating the Truth: The Criminal as Sinner Turned Saint: 3. In the absence of adequate causes: efforts at an etiology of crime; 4. Heaven seized by sincerity and zeal: justifying God, vindicating man; 5. Love makes all things easy: recementing the social bond; Part III. Palliating His Crimes: The Thief as Various Rogues: 6. Smiles, serious thoughts, and things beyond imagining: a provisional typology of thieves in action; 7. Barbarous levities: fear, guilt, and the value of confusion; 8. Everyone left to his own reflections: the oddity of the highwayman as hero and social critic; Postscript; Appendices; Notes; Selected bibliography; Index.
