CHAPTER VIII
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.