I l Defoe and Fielding: StudiES in Thievery and Roguery. by Brian William Last Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dept. of English Studies, December, 1978. ABSTRACT Defoe and Fielding were intensely concerned with the social conditions of the time. The upsurge in crime constituted a threat to the ordinary citizen as well as a danger to civilized values. As Fielding in particular showed, exploitation of the ordinary citizen took place under the guise of respectability. It was the task of the writer to remove this guise and examine the real motives behind the actions of a particular individual and judge that person according to strict moral standards. The criminal was not simply a member of the lower classes; he could be a member of the aristocracy or of the government. The times were corrupt; Defoe and Fielding had to come to terms with this corruption by examining the motives behind it and the possible remedies for it. The difference between the various levels in society becomes blurred in their writings in order to make the point that robbery on the high­ way and robbery by the apparently respectable memeers of society are one and the same thing; both have to be exposed in order to preserve civilized standards. Both writers were searching for the truth, and took care to examine the individual circumstances surrounding a person's lapse into crime so that the fairest judgement possible could be made. This seeking after truth gUides them in their fight against crime and corruption. CONTENTS Chronology i Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Chapter 2. Defoe the Novels 12 Chapter 3. Defoe the Criminal Biographies 57 Chapter 4. Jonathan Wild 83 Chapter 5. Fielding the magistracy 106 Chapter 6. Fielding the novels 125 Chapter 7. Fielding and Gay : the drama 144 Conclusion 176 Appendix. The attacks on Walpole. 179 Bibliography 183 -i- CHRONOLOGY 1712 The Mohocks printed 1714 Accession of George I 1719 Publication of Robinson Crusoe 1720 South Sea Bubble 1721 Walpole becomes first Minister 1722 Moll Flanders A Journal of the Plague Year Colonel Jacque 1724 Ballad Newgate's Garland published Sheppard hanged. (November). Vol. I of the General History of the Pyrates. 1725 Wild hanged (May). 1724-5 Defoe's Lives of Sheppard and Wild. 1727 Accession of George II 1728 The Beggar's Opera (January) Polly (December) Vol. II of The Historv of the Pyrates. 1730 Tom Thumb 1731 The Tragedy of Tragedies The Grub-Street Opera An Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Prevention of Street Robberies Death of Defoe. 1732 The Covent Garden Tragedy. Death of Gay. 1736 Pasguin Gin Act 1737 The Historical Register for the Year 1736 The Stage Licensing Act. 1740 Pamela 1741 Shamela 1742 Joseph Andrews Resignation of Walpole 1743 A Journey from This World to the Next. Jonathan Wild • • -ii- 1745 Death of Walpole. 1748 Fielding becomes Justice of the Peace for Westminster. 1749 Tom Jones. 1751 Amelia An Inquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers. 1752 The Covent-Garden Journal. 1754 Death of Fielding. -1- CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION England had been growing rapidly as a trading nation ever since the time of Elizabeth I. By the beginning of the eighteenth-century, she had emerged as one of the leading trading nations in the world, with markets established in America, Africa and Europe. These trade links provided opportunities for the entrepreneur to expand his personal fortune, for increased wealth meant increased respectability. With the growth in trade also, the expansion of the middle-classes was inevitable, as they set themselves up in business and promoted their own interests - financial gain. As trade grew, so did London 1 s population, but not simply owing to the increased number of bourgeois gentlemen who inhabited the city. London came to have more than its share of thieves and rogues, themselves eager to take their own share of the increased wealth in the capital, but not through trade. The desire for possession meant that people stole in order to have as much of the goods as possible. Protection against theft became an issue that no-one could avoid, and the most obvious way of removing the threat to property was to remove the initial factor: the number of offences punishable by hanging increased rapidly during the early part of the century. Radzinowicz estimates that there were between 160 and 220 offences punishable by death, although the precise number is difficult to estimate due to the Benefit of Clergy; certainly this is no exaggeration, and the number of statutes reflects the importance that property had. 1 1 Radzinowicz, Leon, A History of English Criminal Law, 4 vols,{London, 1948), I, p.3. -2- To the Augustan mind, most aspects of society could be viewed in terms of possession or acquisition of property. 'At other times', writes Pat Rogers, 'people have felt most anxiously about self-preservation or about sexual purity. The threat came to one's person -literally so, , 2 or in terms of sexual violation . One possessed money, stocks, individual fortune in financial or political matters, as well as possessing virginity. The control of people in a political sense took on a financial aspect also, as people were m~noeuvred to suit one's . 3 persona 1 ga~n. The aspiration to become a gentleman or woman related to everyone, and the quickest way to riches, if you were not born into them, was by ast~te business deals, by political gambling, or, if none of these possibilities were open, by stealing someone else's. This meant that the cleverness with which the businessman operated had to be matched by the craft of the criminal: he, too, had to be a professional. Failure at one's job meant financial, political - or sexual - ruin on the one hand, and hanging on the other. So, while much of the crime carried out may well have been the 'hit and run' type, the most successful criminals promoted crime to a financial art, in which book-keeping and columns were an important part. Typically, the most ruthless of them, Jonathan Wild, controlled crime as others controlled their businesses by having an efficient work-force which was answerable only to him, and only one person - Wild - controlled the stock. England's pastoral days seemed to be over: The birds of the air, the rabbits of the heath, the fish in the streams were ferociously protected for the sport and sustenance of gentlemen. Property acquired the sanctity of life and theft 'meant death. Benefit of clergy was abolished and hanging as 2 Rogers, Pat, The Augustan Vision, (London, 1974). p.99. 3 See below, chapter 7. -3- punishment for crime increased ••• (power was) also for the class which had come to dominate British life - commercially minded landowners with a sharp eye for profit.4 Crimina~ too, needed a commercial mind, as well as a keen eye for survival. If the underworld of London had to contend with a variety of statutes, it did not have the problem of evasion of the police force. Social histories of London reveal that London was still administered as though it were a mediaeval village, with the police force no more powerful than the parish 5 constables. Not until the time of Henry Fielding was a real push made towards fighting crime, through the power of the magistracy, backed by his 'Constables', but by then crime had spread so rapidly that Parliament - and Fielding - were desperately seeking a solution to the problem. By 1751, Parliament had come around to the idea that perhaps hanging was not a deterrent, since it had done nothing to curb the number of thieves; perhaps thieves and rogues should be made to work for a living: a Committee of the Commons in 1751 suggested that: ~t would be reasonable to exchange the punishment of death, which is now inflicted for some sorts of offences, into some other adequate punishments' - a proposal which resulted in a bill •••• to substitute bonfinement and hard labour in his majesty's dock­ yards' for the death penalty in a number of crimes - (this) reflected a conviction coming to be widely held that the uncritical harshness of the criminal law had distorted the administration of 6 justice and was itself partly to blame for the increase of crime. In fact, the Bill was thrown out by the Lords, who perhaps reflected the feeling that property was sacrosanct, and that it must be protected from the dregs of society. The concern of parliament was a concern that every- one held; the absence of any effective police force and the increasing 4 Plumb, J.H., Political Man, in Man versus Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. James L. Clifford, (Cambridge, 1968), p. 8-9. 5 See Marshall, Dorothy, Eighteenth-Century England, (London, 1962), p.36-7. 6 Beattie, J.M. Crime and the Courts in Surrey, 1736-1753, in Crime in England. 1500 - 1800, ed. J.S. Cockburn, (London, 1977), p. 155-6. -4- emphasis on possessions, soon came to mean that criminals did not confine their activities to clandestine robberies: In 1731, the author of an anonymous pamphlet related how highwaymen and criminals, no longer content to practise their skills on Hounslow Heath or an the outskirts of the capital, were brazenly moving in to the centre: he instanced cases of Stage Coaches being robbed in High Holborn, Whitechapel, Pall Mall and Soho, and of citizens being held up in their carriages in Cheapside, St. Paul's Churchyard and the Strand. 7 After the robbery the thief would have little difficulty in secreting himself in the back streets of London.