“His roving disposition then induced him to try the sea, and the knowledge he obtained during several voyages fitted him for those maritime frauds which got him the name of ‘Captain Moody, the lurker.’ The frauds of this person are well known, and often recounted with great admiration among the pattering fraternity. On one occasion, the principal butcher in Gosport was summoned to meet a gentlemen at an hotel. The Louisa, a brig, had just arrived at Portsmouth, the captain’s name was Young, and this gentleman Moody personated for the time being. ‘I have occasion,’ said he to the butcher, ‘for an additional supply of beef for the Louisa; I have heard you spoken of by Captain Harrison’ (whom Moody knew to be an old friend of the butcher’s), ‘and I have thus given you the preference. I want a bullock, cut up in 12lb. pieces; it must be on board by three to-morrow.’ The price was agreed upon, and the captain threw down a few sovereigns in payment, but, of course, discovered that he had not gold enough to cover the whole amount, so he proposed to give him a cheque he had just received from Captain Harrison for £100, and the butcher could give him the difference. The tradesman was nothing loth, for a cheque upon ‘Vallance, Mills, and West,’ with Captain Harrison’s signature, was reckoned equal to money any day, and so the butcher considered the one he had received, until the next morning, when the draft and the order proved to be forgeries. The culprit was, of course, nowhere to be found, nor, indeed, heard of till two years after, when he had removed the scene of his depredations to Liverpool.
“In that port he had a colleague, a man whose manners and appearance were equally prepossessing. Moody sent his ‘pal’ into a jeweller’s shop, near the corner of Lord-street, who there purchased a small gold seal, paid for it, and took his leave. Immediately afterwards, Moody entered the shop under evident excitement, declaring that he had seen the person, who had just left the shop secrete two, if not three, seals up his coat-sleeve; adding, that the fellow had just gone through the Exchange, and that if the jeweller were quick he would be sure to catch him. The jeweller ran out without his hat, leaving his kind friend in charge of the shop, and soon returned with the supposed criminal in his custody. The ‘captain,’ however, in the mean time, had decamped, taking with him a tray from the window, containing precious materials to the value of 300l.
“At another time, the ‘captain’ prepared a document, setting forth ‘losses in the Baltic trade,’ and a dismal variety of disasters; and concluding with a melancholy shipwreck, which had really taken place just about that time in the German Ocean. With this he travelled over great part of Scotland, and with almost unprecedented success. Journeying near the Frith of Forth, he paid a visit to Lord Dalmeny—a nobleman of great benevolence—who had read the account of the shipwreck in the local journals, and wondered that the petition was not signed by influential persons on the spot; and, somewhat suspicious of the reality of the ‘captain’s’ identity, placed a terrestrial globe before him, and begged to be shown ‘in what latitude he was cast away.’ The awkwardness with which Moody handled the globe showed that he was ‘out of his latitude’ altogether. His lordship thereupon committed the document to the flames, but generously gave the ‘captain’ a sovereign and some good advice; the former he appropriated at the nearest public-house, of the latter he never made the least use.
“Old, and worn out by excesses and imprisonment, he subsists now by ‘sitting pad’ about the suburban pavements; and when, on a recent evening, he was recognised in a low public-house in Deptford, he was heard to say, with a sigh: ‘Ah! once I could “screeve a fakement” (write a petition) or “cooper a monekur” (forge a signature) with any man alive, and my heart’s game now; but I’m old and asthmatic, and got the rheumatis, so that I ain’t worth a d—n.’
“‘The Lady Lurker.’—Of this person very little is known, and that little, it is said, makes her an object of pity. Her father was a dissenting minister in Bedfordshire. She has been twice married; her first husband was a schoolmaster at Hackney, and nephew of a famous divine who wrote a Commentary on the Bible, and was chaplain to George III. She afterwards married a physician in Cambridgeshire (a Dr. S——), who is alleged to have treated her ill, and even to have attempted to poison her. She has no children; and, since the death of her husband, has passed through various grades, till she is now a cadger. She dresses becomingly in black, and sends in her card (Mrs. Dr. S——) to the houses whose occupants are known, or supposed, to be charitable. She talks with them for a certain time, and then draws forth a few boxes of lucifers, which, she says, she is compelled to sell for her living. These lucifers are merely excuses, of course, for begging; still, nothing is known to have ever transpired in her behaviour wholly unworthy of a distressed gentlewoman. She lives in private lodgings.”
I continue the account of these habitations, and of their wretched occupants, from the pen of the same gentleman whose vicissitudes (partly self-procured) led him to several years’ acquaintance with the subject.
“Padding-kens” (lodging-houses) in the country are certainly preferable abodes to those of St. Giles’s, Westminster, or Whitechapel; but in country as in town, their condition is extremely filthy and disgusting; many of them are scarcely ever washed, and as to sweeping, once a week is miraculous. In most cases they swarm with vermin, and, except where their position is very airy, the ventilation is imperfect, and frequent sickness the necessary result. It is a matter of surprise that the nobility, clergy, and gentry of the realm should permit the existence of such horrid dwellings.
“I think,” continues my informant, “that the majority of these poor wretches are without even the idea of respectability or ‘home comforts,’—many of them must be ranked among the worst of our population. Some, who could live elsewhere, prefer these wretched abodes, because they answer various evil purposes. With beggars, patterers, hawkers, tramps, and vendors of their own manufacture, are mingled thieves, women of easy virtue, and men of no virtue at all; a few, and by far the smallest portion, are persons who once filled posts of credit and affluence, but whom bankruptcy, want of employment, or sickness has driven to these dismal retreats. The vast majority of London vagrants take their summer vacation in the country, and the ‘dodges’ of both are interchanged, and every new ‘move’ circulates in almost no time.
“I will endeavour to sketch a few of the most renowned ‘performers’ on this theatre of action. By far the most illustrious is ‘Nicholas A——,’ an ame known to the whole cadging fraternity as a real descendant from Bamfylde Moore Carew, and the ‘prince of lurkers’ and patterers for thirty years past. This man owes much of his success to his confessedly imposing appearance, and many of his escapes to the known respectability of his connections. His father—yet alive—is a retired captain in the Royal Navy, a gentleman of good private property, and one of her Majesty’s justices of peace for the county of Devon—the southern extremity of which was the birth-place of Nicholas. But little is known of his early days. He went to school at Tavistock, where he received a good education, and began life by cheating his schoolfellows.