And kiss thee as thy wife! Misery’s love,
O, come to me!”
Shakespere, King John, Act iii. Scene 4.
THIEVES AND SWINDLERS.
Introduction.
In tracing the geography of a river it is interesting to go to its source, possibly a tiny spring in the cleft of a rock in some mountain glen. You follow its windings, observing each tributary which flows into its gathering flood until it discharges its waters into the sea. We proceed in a similar manner to treat of the thieves and swindlers of the metropolis.
Thousands of our felons are trained from their infancy in the bosom of crime; a large proportion of them are born in the homes of habitual thieves and other persons of bad character, and are familiarized with vice from their earliest years; frequently the first words they lisp are oaths and curses. Many of them are often carried to the beershop or gin palace on the breast of worthless drunken mothers, while others, clothed in rags, run at their heels or hang by the skirts of their petticoats. In their wretched abodes they soon learn to be deceitful and artful, and are in many cases very precocious. The greater number are never sent to school; some run idle about the streets in low neighbourhoods: others are sent out to beg throughout the city; others go out with their mothers and sit beside their stalls; while others sell a handful of matches or small wares in our public thoroughfares.
One day, in going down a dark alley in the Borough, near Horsemonger Lane Gaol, we saw a little boy—an Irish cockney, who had been tempted to steal by other boys he was in the habit of associating with. He was stripped entirely naked, and was looking over a window on the first floor with a curious grin on his countenance. His mother had kept his clothes from him that day as a punishment for stealing, and to prevent him getting out of the house while she went out to her street-stall.
In our brief sketch of the criminals of the metropolis, we have in the outset directed our attention to the sneaks or common thieves—by far the larger number of our criminal population—from whose ranks the expert pickpockets and the ingenious and daring burglars in most cases emerge. We have treated of the incipient stage of thieving, when the child of five or six years of age steals an apple, or an orange, or a handful of nuts from a stall, or an old pair of boots from a shop door, and then traced the after-stages of more daring crime.