THE LITERATURE OF THE LATER HIGHWAYMEN

Since Smith and Johnson's days, the literature of the highwaymen has declined in quality and increased in output. The history of the highwaymen has never been reconsidered or restated since they flourished, and no one has ever attempted to extend it from 1742. Not even Turpin appears in Johnson's folio, published three years earlier than that "hero's" execution at York: an omission which seems amply to prove that Turpin's contemporaries did not consider him a particularly interesting or notable person.

Yet, although nothing has been done to tell the story of the highwaymen who flourished numerously long after Smith and Johnson had completed their works, there is an abundance of materials for the purpose. They are not nice materials. Distinctly unappetising trials for the most part, "last dying speeches and confessions," usually impudent fabrications, and, when not entirely un-authentic, generally the utterly unreadable productions of the Ordinaries of Newgate and other prisons, who turned an honest, if somewhat discreditable, penny in hearing the generally boastful and lying accounts by prisoners of their crimes and adventures; seldom writing them down from dictation, and commonly but imperfectly memorising them, and only setting down their general sense. That is why the very numerous "authentic" lives, last dying speeches, and confessions of the highwaymen and others, written out by the Ordinaries and usually attested at the end by the criminals themselves, are so bald and unconvincing. An outside rival production was, as a general rule, a good deal more spicy, and although unauthorised, not necessarily less truthful. The "official" productions, as we may term them, were of a stereotyped fashion, ballasted with an intolerable deal of moral reflections, and written in a heavy-handed way that by no means reflected the convict's own generally keen relish of his own villainies. We should not mind all this, if we knew the Ordinaries to have been good and earnest men; but they were nothing of the kind. By education gentlemen, and by virtue of their holy orders bound to maintain the law and the Gospel, they were nevertheless a pack of intolerable scoundrels, drunken and dissolute, and not infrequently as fitted for the cells as the unhappy prisoners in the Stone Jug, to whom on Sundays in the prison chapel they preached Hell and Damnation, the Burning Lake and Everlasting Torment. The publication of the last dying speeches and confessions of their interesting charges was the perquisite of these unworthy men, and it was one of the most indefensible of privileges in that age of perquisites.

Thus the pamphlets they issued and grew fat upon soon pall upon us. There are, however, other sources: the "Newgate Sessions Papers," the somewhat too famous "Newgate Calendar," which shared with the Bible the favour of George Borrow; the "New Newgate Calendar"; the "Malefactors' Bloody Register," and other atrocious "literature"—to give it the conventional title bestowed without discrimination upon all printed matter.

I am sorry for myself, after having perused those dreadful pages, and many other like authorities, in search of the romantic highwayman as seen in fiction. I have not found him, but I have found plentiful evidence of the existence of innumerable ineffable blackguards and irreclaimable villains of the most sordid, unrelieved type: bestially immoral, tigerishly cruel, and cringing cowards until they were safely jugged, when their cowardice was exchanged for a certain callousness. There were exceptions, but the general effect of reading these originals is an effect of moral and material muddiness, of a personal uncleanliness not a little distressing. It would even have a lasting effect of depression, were it not abundantly evident that these things are of a day that is done. They are part of those "good old times" that, happily, are not our times.

Fortunately, even among this extensive literature, it is possible to find some human touches; here and there to trace some humorous rogue and find him entertaining.

Rather late in the day comes James Catnach, with his penny chapbooks and broadsides. He is not elevating, and is often vulgar. The more vulgar his productions, the better they sold. I don't think he quite realised that point, but some modern popular publishing firms have, and profit hugely by it, for vulgarity is popular and pays enormously. If Jemmy Catnach, of Nos. 2 and 3, Monmouth Court, Little Earl Street, hard by the Seven Dials, had fully grasped this point, he would have died worth very much more than the £3,000, £5,000, or even £10,000 he was represented to have left when he quitted this life, about 1841.

James Catnach commenced business about 1813. His publications were all issued at the popular price of one penny, and covered every subject likely to attract the sympathies of the lower classes. Not quite the lowest classes, for they could not at that time read at all. We must not suppose that he dealt only in the horrible. Not by any means. You might buy of him for the nimble penny the history of Goody Two Shoes, the story of Jack the Giant Killer, the affecting tale of Cock Robin, or the even more affecting story of the Babes in the Wood. The "Soldier's Farewell to Home and Parents," in which the illustration is intrinsically so rough, and the paper and print are so abominable, that it is difficult to see which is the soldier and which are the parents, showed that maudlin sentiment was very profitable. He published also a large selection of patriotic, amorous, and tearful ballads; but it is sadly to be confessed that his penny murders were by far the most popular. He had no penny Sunday papers and no halfpenny evenings to compete with him, and the daily and weekly journals ranged from threepence to eightpence. His only competitors were the garret, cellar, and kitchen printers of his own kidney: Birt, of the neighbouring Great St. Andrew Street, and others. But he was the chief of them, the most industrious, and the most successful. He and his small staff in 1824 printed in eight days, off four formes, no fewer than 500,000 copies of an account of the murder of Mr. Weare by Thurtell, and bagged £500 profit on the business. His customers were a low and dirty mob of pedlars, hawkers, and street-sellers, who paid chiefly in coppers, and dirty ones at that. Those were the days when pennies and halfpennies were really coppers, and not, as now, bronze; and they were large. A penny weighed one ounce, and was an appreciable weight in the pocket: sixpence in coppers was a burden. The coppers Catnach received in the way of his business were a nuisance to him, and he was afraid, from their filthy condition, that they would also be infectious, and so he generally boiled them in a solution of potash and vinegar. In the almost vain endeavour to dispose of them he was accustomed to pay the wages of his boys and men in coppers, from ten shillingsworth to forty shillingsworth, and even then had to arduously load up vehicles with the rest, for the bank. His back kitchen was paved with bad pennies set in concrete.

The lives and adventures of the highwaymen were always a safe sale. Like most of his rudely illustrated productions, they were embellished by his own ingenious hand. The backs of old engraved plates of music served him instead of wood-blocks, and these he engraved upon, apparently with a chopper and a hammer, if we may judge by the startling results. He could have taught Thomas Bewick a thing or two in breadth of treatment, and in his noble scorn of detail (or in his inability to execute it, whichever it was) he was undoubtedly the first of the Impressionists. He was rather good at devils, and supreme in picturing a ferocious villain; but not successful in representing a village beauty.

He issued a very good edition of the Life and Adventures of Dick Turpin at the usual price of one penny: good beyond his common run, because he seems to have employed some one to engrave the pictorial cover for him, and you can really distinguish quite easily between Black Bess and the turnpike-gate, over which that gallant mare is shown to be jumping. Dick Turpin, in this production, affects a jockey-cap.

Birt, of Great St. Andrew Street, was another of the many small printers, who issued popular and ill-printed penny lives of Turpin in the days before the boys' penny papers issued in frowsy courts off Fleet Street, began to print long, long romances of him and Tom King, always to be "continued in our next." Birt shows us what purports to be a portrait of Turpin, no doubt from some strictly un-authentic source, and the short narrative ends with the picture of an execution, in which alone the purchaser had his money's worth, for we see two criminals hanging: Turpin and another, who would seem, so far as appearances go, to be his twin brother. It is a new light upon the life and death of the hero.