Reviews for Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld

The average rating for Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-14 00:00:00 Daniel Horton This sampling of 17th and 18th century crime writing is sort of odd to find among the Penguin Classics, even if it does contain a poem by Jonathan Swift at his most lacerating (the subject is a prostitute). The other writer who is elsewhere represented in the Penguin canon is Henry Fielding, who served as an uncommonly modern Justice of the Peace, dubious of the death penalty (at that time applied for property crimes), arguing that social circumstances and law increased crime, and becoming one of the early theoreticians of police work. But the real heroes of this book are the criminals, especially the articulate ones. Pride of place of course goes to the highwaymen and pirates, Dick Turpin, Captain Kidd, and Blackbeard, who was known to shoot at his own crew, once commenting that "if he did not now and then kill one of them, they would forget who he was." There was Jonathan Wild, the thief-taker, a king of the fences who occasionally found it useful to turn in the men who sold to whom. A number of them became characters in "The Threepenny Opera"--Jenny Diver made it into some of the English versions of "Mack the Knife." Class was often at play--well-heeled murderers went free while thieves were hanged or sent to the stocks, where they custom of people coming up and beating a prisoner often left him or her with eventually fatal injuries. What we now call sex offenders are represented, which at the time included homosexuality of any kind. Then there are the simply weird--the gangs the unearthed fresh corpses to sell to doctors for dissection, and the man who followed women around, slicing their skin through their clothes, including a group of sisters with whom he seems to have been obsessed. But nothing is really stranger than the woman who managed to convince a number of people that she was giving birth to rabbits; it took a man of considerable intelligence to question such a incredible event, unattended by midwives and from which the mother recovered with remarkable speed.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-09-27 00:00:00 Rui Xie Interesting anthology. Cases chosen because they demonstrate stand outs rather than regular occurrences. Good to be able to read the primary sources. Some interesting and well known characters in there.