Most of Mandeville's specific proposals too may be paralleled in the many pamphlets of the time concerned with the criminal and the lower class. To point out some of the similarities between Mandeville's and Fielding's proposals (which he states most fully in An Enquiry into the late Increase of Robbers, 1751) is not to posit direct influence but to suggest the uniformity of opinion on these matters during many years. Both Mandeville and Fielding argue for closer control over receivers of stolen goods, against advertising in the paper to recover stolen goods, against the false compassion of the tender-hearted who fail to prosecute or of juries which fail to convict the guilty, against the indiscriminate imprisonment of young with old, hardened criminals with first offenders, men with women, and against frequent pardons. They agree in demanding that the condemned should meet his death, soberly, shortly after his conviction.[7]
Mandeville's suggestion that the bodies of the executed be turned over to surgeons for dissection is not to be found in Fielding's pamphlet. It does, however, become a part of the "Act for preventing the horrid Crime of Murder" (25 Geo. II. c. 37), an act for which Fielding is often given credit.[8] This suggestion, and that in Chapter VI to trade felons into slavery (which as far as I know is Mandeville's own), clearly stem from the impulse to increase the deterrent power of the law by making it more terrible.
What distinguishes Mandeville's pamphlet (in addition to the characteristically hard-headed bluntness of its author) is a quality present in one degree or another in all his work: an exuberant delight in creating scene. Throughout the Fable of the Bees, for example, but especially in the first part, the argument is punctuated by vivid scenes in which an idea is acted out or illustrated. Invariably these scenes have a merit and interest beyond that owing to their function in the argument. They are lively, vivid, picturesque, humorous or touching in their own right. The reader can scarcely doubt that Mandeville enjoyed composing them—he admits as much in the Preface to the Enquiry when he acknowledges, in defending the "lowness" of his subject, the "Pleasure there is in imitating Nature in what Shape soever."
The gusto and vitality of the description of the events at Tyburn well illustrate Mandeville's art. He puts us on the scene, lets us see and hear the various actors, gives us telling detail: a bully rolling in the mire; a putrified wig; a drunken old woman on a bulk; refuse flying through the air; trollops in rags; a gin seller "squeez'd up in a corner"; carcasses of dogs and cats. The scene is filled with objects and has movement as well: the mob is a torrent which "bursts through the gate," a "floating multitude." There is "jostling," "kicking dirt," "rolling"; peddlers "stir about," and one who has "ventured in the Middle of the Current" is "fluctuating in the irregular Stream." The air is filled with "oaths and vile expressions," and "loud laughter"; a peddler "tears his Throat with crying his commodity." Mandeville orders his scene spatially and chronologically, and he enforces its vividness by relating the action in the present tense. Its basic unity, however, is owing to the evaluation and control provided by the various tones of the narrator's voice, which is alternately scornful and disgusted ("abandoned Rakehells") and almost playfully ironic ("he is the prettiest Fellow among them who is the least shock'd at Nastiness"; "their darling Cordial, the grand Preservative of Sloth, Jeneva").
For one reader at least Mandeville is eminently successful in capturing what must have been the appalling uproar and the dismaying quality of the events at Tyburn. His vivid, circumstantial realism sets the Enquiry apart, as far as I know, from all other pamphlets dealing with this sorry subject. If his views for the most part are conventional, his style and technique are not, and in this respect the Enquiry is best compared not with other pamphlets but with Hogarth's portrayal of the demise of the idle apprentice (Plate XI of the Industrious and Idle Apprentice, 1747), in which Hogarth represents visually many of the same details which Mandeville reports and in which he conveys a comparable sense of the violent and brutal activity of the Tyburn mob.
FOOTNOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
[1] See "A Note on the Text" below.
[2] A useful account of Wild's career and fame appears in William R. Irwin's The Making of Jonathan Wild (New York, 1941), pp. 3-32.
[3] The figures are taken from Leon Radzinowicz' A History of English Criminal Law (New York, 1948-56), vol. I, p. 175, n. 45.