Mining a seam of depravity

JOHN PRESTON CON MEN AND CUTPURSES: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld edited by Lucy Moore (Allen Lane, 18.99) IN November 1726 a woman called Mary Toft gave birth to a number of baby rabbits.

This had been preceded by her giving birth to various animal parts, the legs of a cat among them. But then the rabbits started coming, entire and plentiful. In all, Mary produced 17 fully-grown dead rabbits and was the subject of a treatise by a Swiss anatomist sent by George I. The anatomist confessed himself baffled and was inclined to believe Mary's story. Later on, he was forced to apologise publicly for his credulity after she confessed to being a fraud.

Mary Toft is only one of the con artists, crooks, pirates, whores and highwaymen featured by Lucy Moore in her highly enjoyable anthology of "scenes from the Hogarthian underworld". Here are Dick Turpin, Captain Kidd, and the courtesan Sally Salisbury, their exploits related as they appeared in the press, pamphlets and ballads of the time. Here too are Jonathan Wild, the Godfather of 1720s London, and Jack Sheppard the young thief who precipitated Wild's downfall - the subjects of Lucy Moore's previous book, A Thieves Opera.

For those with little or no money, life in 18th-century London was remarkably bleak. It's hardly surprising that so many of them turned to crime. The chances of being caught were slim - there was no police force, only a hopelessly corrupt system of local constables - and the prospect of "a merry life and a short one" must have seemed preferable to one of protracted drudgery.

Those who did get caught often wound up at Tyburn. Hangings were held there every six weeks with up to 15 criminals being despatched at a time.

Afterwards, there would be a tremendous fight for the corpses, with agents from the Surgeon General's anatomy school slugging it out with those who believed that the body parts of criminals brought good luck and warded off disease. Some, not many, survived hanging. The convicted murderer, William Duell, came back to life as the students at the Surgeon's Hall were preparing to dissect him. Two hours later he was sitting in a chair and that evening was sent back to Newgate, where his sentence was commuted to transportation.

Dick Turpin could have used some of Duell's luck. Arrested in York as a horse-thief, Turpin gave a false name and wrote to his brother asking him to provide a character reference. Relations between the two men can hardly have been close - the brother refused to pay the postage on the letter. To make matters worse, it was taken back to the local post office where a schoolmaster recognised the handwriting on the envelope - he had taught Turpin to write. The schoolmaster alerted the authorities and Turpin was unmasked, then hanged.

Prostitution was rife, with all the usual hazards of the profession. In the case of Harriette Wilson, most celebrated of the three courtesan sisters known as The Three Graces, these included crashing boredom - at least whenever the Duke of Wellington came to call. Wellington visited Harriette frequently, much to her dismay. "Wellington was now my constant visitor - a most unentertaining one, Heaven knows!" she revealed in her memoirs. "In the evenings when he wore his broad red ribbon, he looked very like a rat-catcher."

Not all the entries here are as diverting as this. You'd have to be very dedicated indeed to struggle through Henry Fielding's numbing analysis of early Georgian crime figures. A number of the stories are also similar. Yet there is a rich seam of depravity and misfortune here, carefully mined by Lucy Moore who dishes up a good deal of dirt without wallowing in it too gleefully.

For some reason I found myself feeling especially sorry for one Charles Hitchin, who was sentenced to be pilloried in the Strand after being caught "in the company of he-whores". Aware that homosexuals came in for a terrible pasting in the stocks, Hitchin thought it prudent to turn up wearing a suit of armour. It didn't do him much good, though - six months later he died from his injuries.

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