Abstract
In August 1752, a performance of The Beggar’s Opera was advertised at the New Theatre, Upper Marlborough, by the Company of Comedians from Annapolis, capital of Maryland. Whether there were many convicts eager to be in the audience in what one visitor noted as a ‘tobaccohouse’, is not recorded, but there is a certain irony in the fact that England’s best-known dramatic representation of criminals was going to be performed in the colony with the highest proportion of transported convicts in its population. This was not uncommon, for Gay’s musical play provided one of the most popular entertainments in the colonies, in Virginia as well Maryland.1 If British felons did attend, they would only have become prouder of their criminal professions than before, at least so Daniel Defoe asserted (a remark one writer describes as ‘pretty rich from the author of Moll Flanders’).2 In England, according to apocryphal stories, youthful highwaymen were arrested in London with copies of The Beggar’s Opera in their pockets, and so influential was the live performance that one seventeen-year-old is supposed to have left the play and immediately spent his last guinea on a brace of pistols in order to emulate his stage hero, the gentlemanhighwayman MacHeath.3
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Notes
Maryland Gazette, 27 Aug. 1752; see theatre notice for Williamsburg, Virginia Gazette (Purdie and Dixon, and Rind), 26 May 1768; Henry T. Tuckerman, America and her Commentators, with a critical sketch of Travel in the United States (New York: originally 1864, reprinted August M. Kelley, 1970), p. 173, referring to the visit of Rev. Andrew Burnaby; for the history of colonial American theatre, see Walter J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment — the Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977); on population and convicts in Virginia and Maryland, see A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: the Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–75 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 116–18.
David Nokes, John Gay: a Profession of Friendship. A Critical Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 443; for the impact of The Beggar’s Opera in America, see Julian Mates, ‘Some Early American Musical Stage Forms’, Popular Music and Society 13 (2) (1989), 67–75, p. 68.
Andrea Mackenzie, ‘Making Crime Pay: Motives, Marketing Strategies, and the Printed Literature of Crime in England, 1670–1770’, in Greg T. Smith, Allyson N. May and Simon Devereaux (eds), Criminal Justice in the Old World and the New: Essays in Honour of J. M. Beattie (Toronto: Centre for Criminology, 1998), p. 243.
Her account, as Mary Young, is in Philip Rawlings, Drunks, Whores and Idle Apprentices: Criminal Biographies of the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992); The Complete Newgate Calendar, 6 vols (London: Navarre Society, 1926), vol. 3, pp. 102–8, ‘Mary Young alias Jenny Diver’, Old Bailey Sessions Papers, 16 Jan. 1741; Newcastle Courant, 26 May 1738, as an example of a provincial newspaper taking an interest; John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, ed. Edgar V. Roberts (London: Edward Arnold, 1968; originally University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 39
Maryland Gazette, 10 June 1756 — Poney had earlier been branded for bur-glary, Maryland Gazette, 12 June 1751; for two alternative stories on Ketch, see Walter Thombury and Edward Walford, Old and New London: a Narra-tive o f its History, Its People and its Places (London, 1897), vol. 5, p. 196 (cited in Roberts’ edition of The Beggar’s Opera, p. 27) and V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 116. There are parallels in the late nineteenth-century creation of the ‘hooligan’ in England, which was based on a myth-ical London gang led by someone called Hooley: see Geoff Pearson, Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears (London: Macmillan, 1983).
John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), pp. 436–7.
Ebenezer Cook, 1667–1733, The Sot-Weed Factor; or a Voyage to Maryland etc. (London, 1708), reprinted in Paul Lauter (ed.) The Heath Anthology of Ameri-can Literature, 2 vols, 2nd edn (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), pp. 631–49; Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, ed. David Blewett (London: Penguin, 1989); on non-criminal migra-tion, see David Souden, “‘Rogues, Whores and Vagabonds?”: Indentured Servant Emigrants to North America and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth Century Bristol’, Social History 3 (1978), 23–41; for a positive assessment of the opportunities for convicts in the colonies, see Michael J. Rozbicki, The Complete Colonial Gentleman: Cultural Legitimacy in Plantation America (Char-lottesville, VA and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 92–6.
P. Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and Their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1991), p. 264, argues that in Britain, uniquely in Europe, the importance of imprisonment declined during the period 1720–80 as transportation to the colonies was adopted; J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 498–9 and 548–9, documents the decline of imprisonment after 1718 in Surrey and Sussex.
Stuart B. Schwartz, ‘The Formation of a Colonial Identity in Brazil’, in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (eds), Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 15–50, p. 21; Timothy J. Coates, ‘Crime and Punishment in the Fifteenth-Century Portuguese World: the Transition from Internal to Imperial Exile’, in Donald J. Kagay and L. J. Andrew Villalon (eds), The Final Argument: the Imprint of Violence on Society in Medieval and Early Modem Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 119–39, noting a 1903 statement by a Portuguese author, p. 139; for France see James D. Hardy, ‘The Transportation of Convicts to Colonial Louisiana’, Louisiana History 7 (1966), 207–20, p. 220; for the later French practice, see Richard Price, The Convict and the Colonel (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1998); Stephen P. Frank, Crime, Cultural Conflict and Justice in Rural Russia, 1856–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999).
Simon Devereaux, ‘In Place of Death: Transportation, Penal Practices and the English State, 1770–1830’, in Carolyn Strange (ed.), Qualities of Mercy: Justice, Punishment and Discretion (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1996), 52–76, pp. 58–9; Morgan and Rushton, Rogues, Thieves, Chapters 7 and 8; Joanna Innes, ‘The Role of Transportation in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century English Penal Practice’, in Carl Bridge (ed.), New Perspectives in Australian History (London: Institute for Commonwealth Studies, Occasional Papers no. 5, 1990), 1–24.
Lois Green Carr, ‘Emigration and the Standard of Living: the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake’, in John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (eds), The Early Modern Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 319–43, p. 320; see also Marilyn C. Baseler, ‘Asylum for Mankind’: America 1607–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 104; servitude in the colonies was very different from its equivalent institution in Britain.
David Armitage, ‘Three Concepts of Atlantic History’, in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds), The British Atlantic World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 11–27, p. 26.
See Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: an Exploration of Communication and Community (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Part 1 is organized around products and routes.
Kenneth Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 126; also see his ‘Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America, 1750–1800’, in McCusker and Morgan, Early Modem Atlantic Economy, 16–62.
Keach Johnson, ‘The Baltimore Company Seeks English Markets: a Study of the Anglo-American Iron Trade, 1731–55’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 16 (1) (1959), 37–60, pp. 49, 54; Morgan, Bristol and the Atlantic Trade, pp. 126–7.
Morgan, ‘Business Networks’, p. 36; T. H. Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods: the Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 467–99; see Joshua Johnson’s Letterbook, 1771–4: Letters from a Merchant in London to his Partners in Maryland, ed. Jacob M. Price (London: London Record Society, 1979), p. 33.
Colin Kidd, British Identities Before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 263.
Quarter Sessions Records for the County o f Somerset, 4 vols, ed. Rev. H. E. Bates (later H. E. Bates Harbin), from vol. 2 (Somerset Record Society, 1907–19), vol. 3, pp. 46, 358–9.
See L. Radzinowicz, A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, 4 vols, vol. 1 The Movement for Reform (London: Stevens and Sons, 1948), where the implications for American or even British society are widely neglected; Ekirch, Bound for America; B. Bailyn, Voyagers to the West: a Passage in the Peopling of America on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1986); Aaron S. Fogleman, ‘From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: the Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution’, Journal of American History 85 (1) (1998), 43–75.
P. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History o f the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000); called the ‘red Atlantic’ by Armitage, ‘Three Concepts’, pp. 14–15.
Gwenda Morgan, “One of the First Fruits of Liberty”: Penal Reform in the Young Republic’ in R. A. Burchell (ed.), The End of Anglo-America: Historical Essays in the Study of Cultural Divergence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 87–112; Cindy C. Burgoyne, ‘Imprisonment the Best Punishment: the Transatlantic Exchange and Communication of Ideas in the Field of Penology, 1750–1800’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sunderland, 1997).
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Random House, 1994).
Charles Coleman Sellers, The Artist o f the Revolution: the Early Life of Charles Willson Peale (Hebron, CT: Feather and Good, 1939), on Charles Peale, his father, p. 29; see Chapter 4.
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© 2004 Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton
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Morgan, G., Rushton, P. (2004). Introduction: the Formation of the Criminal Atlantic. In: Eighteenth-Century Criminal Transportation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230000872_1
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