Abstract
Where the animal tropes discussed in the previous chapter were associated with a single genre and a specific, albeit disputed, classical heritage, the texts to be analysed in Chapter 7 span a variety of different literary forms. They are also, for the most part, decidedly more modern in their inspirations. In their particular fascination with the criminal underbelly of British society and in their attempts to make sense of political life by reference to this unsavoury sub-culture, they are more specific to their era, speaking for the concerns of an increasingly urban and urbane readership, and reflecting the growth of audacious, politically conscious spheres of public debate.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Douglas Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Douglas Hay (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 17–63 (63).
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1979; originally published, Allen Lane, 1977), p. 49.
E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (1971), 76–136 (120).
[Bernard Mandeville], A Modest Defence of Publick Stews: or, An Essay upon Whoring (London: Printed by A. Moore, 1724), p. 8.
M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Public Virtue and Private Vices: Bernard Mandeville and English Political Ideologies in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 9:4 (1976), 477–510 (489).
Frank McLynn, Crime and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 22–30.
Gerald Howson, Thief-Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1970).
Accounts consulted include [H.D.], The Life of Jonathan Wild, from his Birth to his Death (London: Printed for T. Warner, 1725); The Life and Glorious Actions of the Most Heroic and Magnanimous Jonathan Wilde (London, 1725).
[Daniel Defoe], The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild (London: John Applebee, 1725); The History of the Lives and Actions of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker. Joseph Blake, alias Blueskin, Foot-Pad. And John Sheppard, Housebreaker (London: Printed for Edward Midwinter, 1725).
Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hambledon and London, 2004), p. 99.
Vic Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 100.
Henry Fielding, Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London: A. Millar, 1743), III; later published with revisions as Henry Fielding, The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great (London: Printed for A. Millar, 1754).
See, for instance, Wilbur L. Cross, The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. (London: Yale University Press, 1918).
Martin C. Battestin, ‘Fielding’s Changing Politics and Joseph Andrews’, Philological Quarterly 39 (1960), 39–55.
See also Frederick G. Ribble, ‘Fielding’s Rapprochement with Walpole in Late 1741’, Philological Quarterly 80:1 (2001), 71–81.
Hollis Rinehart, ‘The Role of Walpole in Fielding’s Jonathan Wild’, English Studies in Canada 5:4 (1979), 420–31 (420).
Thomas Keymer, ‘Cough Up’, London Review of Books 30:22 (20 November 2008), 32–3 (33).
Treadwell Ruml II, ‘Jonathan Wild and the Epistemological Gulf Between Virtue and Vice’, Studies in the Novel 21:2 (1989), 117–27 (126).
Ruml writes in response to Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).
Fielding, Miscellanies, III, p. 155. For similar arguments concerning Fielding’s use of irony in Jonathan Wild, see Paula McDowell, ‘Narrative Authority, Critical Complicity: The Case of Jonathan Wild’, Studies in the Novel 30:2 (1998), 211–31.
W. Walker Wilkins, Political Ballads of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Annotated, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1860), II, pp. 269–71 (271). A copy is held at the British Library; Wilkins dates the ballad to 1741, by which time the Duke of Argyll had been in more or less open opposition to Walpole for five years.
John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (London: John Watts, 1728), p. 3.
Graham Midgley notes that, in spite of an enduring hatred of Walpole’s close adviser and ecclesiastical ally, Edmund Gibson, Orator Henley remained loyal to the minister himself in both his writings and his ‘sermons’. Only after Walpole’s fall did Henley turn against the government, beginning to sound much like his own enemies in his choice of arguments and general political disillusionment. See Graham Midgley, The Life of Orator Henley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 35, 220–8.
Peter Elfed Lewis, ‘Introduction’, in The Beggar’s Opera (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1973), pp. 1–42 (15).
Peter E. Lewis, ‘The Uncertainty Principle in The Beggar’s Opera’, Durham University Journal 72:2 (1980), 143–6 (146).
Sven M. Armens, John Gay, Social Critic (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1954), p. 61.
Smith and Taylor, ‘Hephaestion and Alexander’, p. 297; see also Jason M. Kelly, ‘Riots, Revelries, and Rumor: Libertinism and Masculine Association in Enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies 45:4 (2006), 759–95 (764–5, 778).
See Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘A Man in Love’ and ‘The Lover. A Ballad’ in Halsband and Grundy, eds., Essays and Poems, pp. 233–6.
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1950), p. 200.
John Gay, Polly: An Opera. Being the Second Part of the Beggar’s Opera (London, 1729).
Jerry C. Beasley, ‘Portraits of a Monster: Robert Walpole and Early English Prose Fiction’, Eighteenth Century Studies 14:4 (1981), 406–31 (425).
For the prominence of Locke in work by Court Whigs like Benjamin Hoadly, and for the contrasting resistance to Lockean contract theory in other proministerial authors, see Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas, pp. 87–8, 235–41. For more general reticence in the reception of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689), see Dickinson, Liberty and Property, p. 10.
J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party, 1689–1720 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 17–18.
Gilly Lehmann, ‘Politics in the Kitchen’, Eighteenth-Century Life 23:2 (1999), 71–83.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Emrys D. Jones
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Jones, E.D. (2013). Friendship and Criminality. In: Friendship and Allegiance in Eighteenth-Century Literature. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300508_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137300508_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-45312-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-30050-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)