Biting the Biter: Sex, Scatology, and Satirical
Inversion in Augustan Highwayman “Lives”
Andrea McKenzie
abstract In this essay, Andrea McKenzie argues that the scatological and
bawdy humor for which early eighteenth-century highwayman lives were so notorious functioned as a particularly pungent form of social and political commentary. The invocation of both blackguard protagonists and authors reinforced the
element of social shaming and inversion, while the common trope of the “biting
the biter” (implying that it is no crime to con, outwit, or despoil those who prey on
others) was readily adaptable to a Tory or “Country” satirical program. She also
aims to shed new light on an old and vexed question: to what degree were representations of social inversion normative or subversive? keywords: political
aspects of satire; eighteenth-century scatological and misogynist humor; Captain
Alexander Smith (pseud.); Captain Charles Johnson (pseud.); Edward Ward
Bite, a Rogue, Sharper, or Cheat; also a Woman’s Privities. Bite the Biter, that is, to
rob the Rogue, sharp the Sharper, or cheat the Cheater . . . The Cull wapt the Mort’s
Bite, i.e., the Fellow enjoy’d the Whore briskly.
—“The Thieves New Canting Dictionary,” in Captain Alexander Smith,
A Compleat History of the Lives and Robberies of the most Notorious HighwayMen, Foot-Pads, Shop-Lifts, and Cheats, of Both Sexes, 5th ed. (1719–20)
early eighteenth-century highwayman “lives” were salacious even by
the standards of their own age. In the words of one contemporary critic (and Grub
Street rival), the pseudonymous “Captain” Alexander Smith’s sensational, extremely
bawdy, much-maligned—and subsequently much imitated—1714 “History” of semifictionalized robbers was
a confus’d Lump of absurd Lies, gross Obscenity, aukward Cant, and dull
Profaneness. If you find a Story, or but one Sentence in all his Scribling,
that is even tolerable, depend upon it he stole it; he has the most unlucky
Talent at Invention of any Man breathing, for he’s as great a Stranger to
Fable as to Truth; he’s so far from writing Probabilities, (without which
Pp. 235–256. ©2013 by Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery. issn 0018-7895 | e-issn 1544-399x. All rights
reserved. For permission to photocopy or reproduce article content, consult the University of California Press Rights
and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/hlq.2013.76.2.235.
huntington library quarterly | vol. 76, no. 2
235
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andrea mckenzie
even a Romance be monstrous) that he tells you of things that are entirely
impossible; Lies, that Sir John Mandevile would have been asham’ d of;—
and yet the Fool diverts the Populace—and so does a Monkey—but
much more agreably.1
If highwayman literature has traditionally been viewed as too low to warrant
serious study, more recent scholarship has tended to touch on it largely insofar as it
constitutes a precursor to realist fiction and the rise of the novel and, by extension, the
emergence of the middle class, a new preoccupation with individualism and the origins of modern subjectivities.2 Such studies, working on the assumption that “the
function of literary genres is to mediate and explain intractable problems,”3 have
focused on the ways in which highwayman lives either served to assuage or displace
guilt or anxiety about crime and a harsh capital code, and/or as a species of escapism
and voyeuristic wish-fulfillment, a vicarious identification with a transgressive social
and moral other—a “charismatic deviant,” the “prototypical individualist self,” or
(more recently still), “a nostalgic modern masculine fantasy.”4 Whether criminal biographies are seen as normative (the exemplary death of the highwayman reinforcing the
more conventional moral choices of readers)5 or more slippery (threatening to “[stir]
up the very subversive possibilities. . . . they [presumably] set out to contain”),6 it has
generally been assumed that the choice of a highwayman protagonist reflected a larger
fascination with and anxiety about transgression and crime.
In contrast, this essay will examine a central, yet under-explored, facet of early
eighteenth-century highwayman lives: the degree to which these semi-fictionalized
biographies functioned as a particularly pungent form of social and political commentary.7 For, far from being viewed as a pathology in need of explanation or denial, crime
1. E. B., The Highland Rogue: or, the Memorable Actions of the Celebrated Robert Mac-Gregor,
commonly called Rob Roy (1723), vi–vii. Unless otherwise noted, all primary printed sources are
published in London; most long titles have been abbreviated; full titles are available on ECCO
(Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and EEBO (Early English Books Online).
2. See Ian Watt’s seminal work, The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957); see also John J. Richetti,
Popular Fiction before Richardson (Oxford, 1969); Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of
the English Novel (New York, 1983); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740
(Baltimore, 1987); Lincoln Faller, Crime and Defoe: A New Kind of Writing (Cambridge, 1993);
Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England
1591–1791 (Cambridge, 1997); Hal Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative in Eighteenth-Century
England: Beyond the Law (Baltimore, 2001).
3. McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 419.
4. Lincoln B. Faller, Turned to Account: The Forms and Functions of Criminal Biography in Late
Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1987); Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self, 180, 18; and Erin Mackie, Rakes, Highwaymen and Pirates: The Making of the Modern
Gentleman in the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 2009), 41.
5. See Faller, Turned to Account, 175; Faller, Crime and Defoe, xiii, 5.
6. Gladfelder, Criminality and Narrative, 77.
7. More attention has been given to the satiric potential of Elizabethan and Jacobean picaresque
literature; see, for instance, Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets
1580–1640 (London, 1983), 40, 42, 54; and Anna Bayman, “Cross-Dressing and Pamphleteering in
inversion in highwayman “lives”
237
commonly served as a metaphor for universal human frailty; and representations of
the criminal underworld, a “Christall” or a “mirrour” of respectable society.8 In the
context of a culture in which all men and women were sinners, and civil and criminal
transgressions—private and public sins—were ontologically connected, moral, criminal, and satirical tropes were often interchangeable.9 The particularly bawdy and scatological brand of satire produced by Captain Alexander Smith and his imitators was, I
will argue, funny and pointed not so much because it mediated the subconscious and
unacknowledged anxieties—and furtive desires and fantasies—of the reader, but
because the transgressions celebrated in such stories conformed to classic, and familiar, joke patterns.
Rachel Carnell has approached the rise of the novel from the perspective of
“partisan discourse” rather than the emergence of modern individualism or subjectivity, arguing that early British novelists, “rather than forging a consensus about the ‘universal’ nature of human experience, focused on the sharp differences between
individuals” deriving from their “contingent domestic, social, economic and partisan
positions”—including that of Whig versus Tory.10 It may be similarly instructive to
read Captain Alexander Smith’s particular sub-genre of semi-fictional realism as a
kind of “partisan discourse,” best legible in the context of the deeply divided political
world of late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. The constant juxtaposition of high
and low life in Augustan highwayman “lives” communicated the kind of moral relativism famously expressed in more canonical eighteenth-century works, such as John
Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, which have long been
understood as political commentary. Smith’s highwaymen (and, later, Captain Charles
Johnson’s pirates) similarly acted as vehicles for a particularly Tory brand of political
satire, and one that was moreover trenchant and funny not so much because of the
reader’s identification with the blackguard protagonist, but rather because the latter
functioned as a kind of idiom of greatest shame with which societal corruption,
hypocrisy, and roguery could be pilloried.
It is difficult for modern readers to appreciate why eighteenth-century men and
women laughed at Smith’s and Johnson’s coarse, frequently misogynist, and often cruel
brand of humor, their sudden and jarring shifts from the crudest of bathroom humor
to casual violence, from merry pranks and frolics to murder and rape. On one level, the
very callousness of the jokes may have appealed to the lowest common denominator in
readers; as Northrup Frye has observed, “invective is one of the most readable forms
of literary art, just as panegyric is one of the dullest . . . we like hearing people cursed
and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous
enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a
Early Seventeenth-Century London,” in Moral Panics, the Media and the Law in Early Modern England, ed. David Lemmings and Claire Walker (Basingstoke, U.K., 2009), 65.
8. Cynthia Herrup, “Law and Morality,” Past & Present 106 (1985): 309; Gladfelder, Criminality and
Narrative, 11.
9. Andrea McKenzie, Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England, 1675–1775 (London, 2007), chap. 3.
10. Rachel Carnell, Partisan Politics, Narrative Realism and the Rise of the British Novel (New York,
2006), 43, 14.
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smile.”11 But much humor is also historically specific, not translating well across time:
jokes have to contain common reference points and to conform to, and to disrupt or to
overturn, recognizable patterns to be both comprehensible and funny. The principal
aim of this article is to unpack both the humor and the larger animating preoccupations of early eighteenth-century highwayman lives by situating them within their
own historical and political context. For it should not be forgotten that such stories
were meant to be broadly intelligible and relevant—targeting not only the general, and
timeless, theme of universal roguery and corruption, but also more recent, and particular, abuses on the part of public figures readily identifiable by the reader. Finally, in
exploring just what it was about these repetitive, formulaic, frequently gross, and
sometimes callously violent stories that resonated with contemporaries, I also hope to
shed new light on an old and vexed question: to what degree were representations of
social inversion—the “carnivalesque” or the world turned upside down—normative or
subversive? If, as the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas has suggested, a joke is
an “anti-rite”12—a challenge to or a momentary inversion of social orthodoxies and
hierarchies—what larger values were challenged (or affirmed) by eighteenth-century
highwayman “lives”? In short, what did they mean?
Tory Highwaymen and Blackguard Libels
While stories of Robin Hood and fictional and semi-fictional bandits had long formed
the staple of chapbooks and ballads, the golden age of highwayman literature began in
earnest with the 1714 publication of Captain Alexander Smith’s two-volume History of
the Lives of the Most Noted Highway-men, Foot-pads, Housebreakers, Shop-lifts and
Cheats, etc. Smith’s collection went into an additional volume and into its fifth edition
within five years of its publication, and spawned scores of imitations.13 Most famous
among these were several collections by Smith’s fellow self-styled “Captain” Charles
Johnson, who recycled and improved upon Smith’s highwayman stories as well as publishing numerous accounts of pirates.14 Several more pseudonymous Grub Street
“Captains” published slightly reshuffled and abridged versions of both Smith’s and
Johnson’s works well into the mid-eighteenth century.15 The identity of such authors
11. Northrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, N.J., 1957), 224.
12. Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Selected Essays in Anthropology, 2nd ed. (London and New
York, 1999), 153.
13. Capt. Alexander Smith, History of the Lives of the Most Noted Highway-men, Foot-pads, Housebreakers, Shop-lifts and Cheats, Of both Sexes, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1714), 2:v. All citations are either from
the 1714 two-volume second edition, cited as LH, or from the 1719–20 expanded three-volume fifth
edition, entitled A Compleat History of the Lives and Robberies of the most Notorious Highway-Men
(1719–20), cited as CH.
14. Captain Charles Johnson published A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most
Famous Highway-men, Murderers, Street Robbers &c. To which is added, a Genuine Account of the Voyages and Plunders of the most Notorious Pyrates in 1734 (cited as GH); a second edition was published
in 1742; an earlier collection of pirate lives, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most
notorious Pyrates, was published in 1724; see Philip Gosse, A Bibliography of the Works of Captain
Charles Johnson (New York, 1927).
15. Captain Macklecan, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers and Pyrates (1753); Captain Mackdonald, A General History of the
inversion in highwayman “lives”
239
remains obscure: J. M. Moore’s attribution of Johnson’s earlier work on pirates to Daniel
Defoe has been questioned by more recent scholarship,16 while Captain Alexander
Smith remains an even more shadowy figure. His anti-Presbyterian, anti-Quaker, and
anti-Whig bent suggests a Grub Street Tory; indeed, the only explicit clue to Smith’s
identity, a few teasing lines in the preface to the second volume of his 1714 Lives of the
Highwaymen, may well point to the author of The London Spy, Edward “Ned” Ward:
“I must acquaint my Readers, that the publisher tells me, those that don’t know me,
enquire mightily who the Author Capt. Alexander Smith is; and those that know
me, wonder at my Throwing off the Gown to take up the Sword. To which I have no
more to say, than that for them who are not of my Acquaintance, I would not have ’em
ask after me any more than I do after them; and as for leaving the Study of divinity to
follow a Military Employment, I am not the first” (LH 2:v). This may be a reference to
the 1710 pro-Sacheverellian mock-Quaker tract, Aminadab: Or, the Quaker’s Vision,
attributed to Ward17 (and, as I suggest below, is susceptible of another anti-Whig double entendre).18 Certainly Smith’s work, like that of Ward, takes pains to single out for
ridicule low churchmen in general, and anti-Sacheverellian pamphleteers in particular—not to mention the scatological and misogynist humor common to both.
Whatever the identity of their authors—and the fact they were published under
pseudonyms probably reflected a general intention to cater to a broad readership—
highwayman lives were popular across a wide social spectrum: the longer and more
expensive collections, often illustrated with plates—aimed at the middling sorts who
also read newspapers, periodicals, and novels19—went through multiple editions,
while cheaper abridged collections and pamphlets, broadsides, and street ballads featuring highwaymen, pirates, and other notorious rogues also proliferated. These stories were later bowdlerized and abridged for a primarily juvenile audience, and—along
with the ordinary of Newgate’s Accounts—form the basis of the various Newgate calendars published and republished from the late eighteenth century.
Smith’s and Johnson’s collections attributed various dubious exploits, pranks,
frolics, and dirty jokes (many of these borrowed from oral and written traditions, and
popular and classical sources including Boccaccio and Chaucer, as well as various picaresque works, imported and homegrown, such as Lazarillo de Tormes and the English
Rogue) to both historical criminals and wholly mythical social bandits and rogues,
Lives and Adventures of the most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Pirates, Street-Robbers and ThiefTakers (1758); many more condensed versions of both Smith and Johnson (but especially the latter)
were published anonymously.
16. J. R. Moore, in his Checklist of the Writings of Daniel Defoe (Bloomington, Ind., 1960); P. N.
Furbank and W. R. Owens, Defoe De-Attributions: A Critique of J. R. Moore’s Checklist (London, 1994);
see also their A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe (London, 1998).
17. See title page of Ned Ward, Matrimony Unmask’d; or the Comforts and Discomforts of Marriage
Display’d (1714); a later “Aminadab” pamphlet, The Tory Quaker: or, Aminadab’s new vision in the fields,
after a cup of the creature (1717) is attributed by ECCO to Ward, and included in the fifth volume of the
latter’s miscellanies.
18. This may also double as a reference to Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and
by extension, to John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough; see discussion below.
19. The same printer, Charles Rivington, published both Captain Charles Johnson’s General
History of the Pyrates in 1724 and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela in 1741, for instance.
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such as Robin Hood and Falstaff. Literary scholars have long noted the connections
between criminal biography and the emergence of realist fiction: according to Lennard
Davis, there was “something inherently novelistic about the criminal, or rather the
form of the novel seems almost to demand a criminal content.”20 For Lincoln Faller,
the frequency with which fact and fiction intersected in Smith’s highwayman lives—
that is, his “apportioning of fictional adventures to actual historical [criminals]”—is a
strategy for “‘palliating’ both thieves and their crimes” by making them seem less real,
less threatening.21 But I would suggest that the interweaving of “real” crimes and the
pranks and fantastic adventures of jestbooks and picaresque literature also signaled to
readers that, as the criminal episode was fictional, a joke was intended, thus inviting
audiences to speculate about links between the putative robbery and analogous contemporary scandals and rogueries.
The typical format of these accounts, and the running gag, was that the highwayman or street robber would rob victims whom he would then expose as greater
rogues than himself. Among the frequently robbed numbered usurers, grain engrossers, misers, tinkers, tailors, bakers, millers and other proverbial crooked tradesmen,
quacks or “strolling” doctors, apothecaries, astrologers, gypsies, lawyers, bailiffs,
stockjobbers, mistresses of the king, and other court parasites, such as placemen.
Smith’s and Johnson’s robbery victims also included an inordinate number of Puritans,
Quakers, and Presbyterians, not to mention Oliver Cromwell and the other regicides,
who apparently frequently traveled by coach with large amounts of money.22 A standard feature of such stories was the lecture delivered by the highwayman when his victim imprudently declaimed against the sin of robbery. The robber–cum–social critic
generally opened with a speech to the effect of “How dare you, a lawyer (or moneylender, etc.), speak to me of robbing?” before enumerating the knaveries of all trades,
occupations, and ranks of life. It was of course a commonplace of such literature—and
eighteenth-century satire generally—to equate big rogues and little, often suggesting
that the only difference between them was that little rogues were routinely apprehended and punished for venial offences while their social betters, the “state-villains,”
not only robbed on a much larger scale, but with apparent impunity.23 Thus robbers
were sometimes facetiously referred to as “High-way Lawyers” and politicians as “publick” highwaymen.24 In the preface to his 1724 collection of highwayman lives, Captain
Charles Johnson claims to have confined his attentions to common felons perforce, as
the “Memoirs” of “Great Villains” would “swell to a very large Bulk” (GH 1).
As I have suggested, to the extent highwayman lives reflect a coherent agenda, it
is a loosely Tory or “Country” program: an opposition to those associated with the new
monied classes (lawyers, stockjobbers, moneylenders) and those with places in court
20. Davis, Factual Fictions, 125.
21. Faller, Turned to Account, 171.
22. Crooked tradesmen and the “godly” had long been the stock targets of popular satirical attack;
see Adam Fox, “Ballads, Libels and Popular Ridicule in Jacobean England, Past & Present 145 (1994): 79.
23. See, for instance, McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 387.
24. John Clavell, A Recantation of an Ill Led Life: Or, a Discoverie of the High-way Law, 3rd ed.
(1634), 6; The London Magazine, August 1732, 246.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
241
or government offices, who were in this period invariably Whigs. Smith’s Lives were
routinely advertised alongside anti-Whig publications, such as the History of the Calf ’s
Head Club;25 nor is it a coincidence that many of the pseudonymous authors of highwayman literature assumed noms de plume such as Captains Mackdonald and Macklecan, for instance: the derivation of “Tory” was that of an Irish robber, after all. If
nothing else, the timing of such literature seems significant. When Smith’s first edition
of highwayman lives was published in June 1714, Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts,
was still living, but without an heir. If the Hanoverian accession seemed inevitable, it
was nonetheless not anticipated with enthusiasm. The golden age of highwayman literature was, significantly, also that of Tory proscription and Whig ascendency. As is
well known, the Whig oligarchy that governed Britain in the absence of any credible
opposition (the Tories were so tarred with the Jacobite brush that none held office
between 1714 and 1760) was extremely unpopular, and the butt of much contemporary
satire.26
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, highwayman literature tended to focus on the
corruption and hypocrisy of the political forbears of the Whigs—that is, seventeenthcentury Parliamentarians, as well as Puritans and other Protestant sectarians (Quakers, Baptists, and Presbyterians, for example). Thus Smith’s lives frequently feature
royalist highwaymen like Captain James Hind, who robs only the “Enemies” of the
exiled “Royal family,” such as “that King-killing Son of a Whore,” the “celebrated Villain Sergeant Bradshaw”(LH 1:276). Smith delighted in such comic incongruities as the
“Quaking Highwayman” striking fear in the hearts of travelers, who could not tell
whether “it was Mr. Yea and Nay, till he robb’d them in the formal Language of those
worst of British Schismatics”—addressing them as “Dearly Beloved” (CH 3:102, 100).
Another ridiculous conjuncture features the Quaker “Samuel P——s [Perris],” who,
having “reduc’d himself to very low Circumstances, by Whoring, Gaming and Drinking,” mistakes the robber Tom Jones for a bailiff about to arrest him for debt. While
Perris is relieved to be robbed only of what was in his pockets, rather than to be carted
to jail, the “honest Highway-man” was “much disgruntled” to have been mistaken “for
a Cannibal or Maneater” (LH 2:89–90).
In a story about one “Dr Burges” (Daniel Burgess, a dissenting minister, and
anti-Sacheverellian pamphleteer), “the Presbyterian parson” adopts a dog formerly
owned by a pickpocket, who duly snatches purses in Newgate Street while the “old
Doctor [was] stepping into a Distiller’s Shop to drink a dram of Geneva.” The gintippling parson was then obliged to hang “the poor Cur, for fear he should at last pick
Pockets in his Meeting-House” (CH 1:266). Smith’s other publications continue to single out various Protestant Nonconformists (likely the author’s personal enemies), as
well as the traditional republican bogeymen, for abuse. In his History of Cuckolds, we
are told that Cromwell “oftener fled” to one Madam Farmer (a woman “so common,
that in less than Three Weeks . . . she lay with more Men than would make up a Troop
25. See, for instance, Post Boy, June 15–17, 1714.
26. Bertrand A. Goldgar, Walpole and the Wits: The Relation of Politics to Literature, 1722–1742
(Lincoln, Neb., 1976).
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of Horse”) “than his Wife for an Act of Consolation”; and that this mistress, after
having been turned off (having the “Misfortune to Pox the Usurper”) set up a “BawdyHouse in Milford-lane” catering to “Presbyterians, Anabaptists, and those peaceable
People call’d Quakers.” Other amorous pseudo-histories include that of the notorious
informer Titus Oates, and sometime tool of Shaftesbury’s Whigs (“the Reverend Doctor . . . was not so intirely addicted to Sodomy, but that he could dispense to allay the
Titillation of Nature with the Female Sex”); “W— P—n [William Penn] Quaker”
(“Pox’d by one Mrs Needham”); and the ubiquitous “D— B— [Daniel Burgess] a Presbyterian Parson,” who supposedly engaged in an adulterous relationship with “Dame
B—” (that is, Bum), the wife of a bailiff.27
It is interesting, and no accident, that both the protagonists of such highwayman literature (the robbers), and the pseudonymous authors themselves (“Captains”
of dubious commission), are presented as blackguards or rogues. “Captain” was a title
famously claimed or attributed to highwaymen, or “Knights of the Road” like Ned
Ward’s highwayman in The London Spy, who claimed to be a “disbanded officer.”28
This invocation of blackguard titles for both the vehicles and authors of social satire
reinforced the element of social shaming and inversion, analogous to the seventeenth-century verse libels that, as Alistair Bellany, Thomas Cogswell, and Adam Fox
have demonstrated, functioned as a kind of “weapon of the weak,” in which people of
humble station could ridicule their social betters, by singing and passing along insulting ballads: “the idiom of odium.”29 (Such ridicule was doubly effective in that, as an
“anonymous crime”—that is, one in which it was difficult to identify and punish the
perpetrators—it enjoyed and invited wide participation.) As recent scholarship has
emphasized, “the borders between popular and elite literary practice” in early modern
England were “more porous” than has traditionally been assumed, with literate culture borrowing from and engaging with oral and popular traditions.30 Moreover, the
mere fact of such cross-class borrowing could be satirical in itself. Just as the “lowness” of the airs in The Beggar’s Opera sharpened the trenchancy of its satire, Dianne
27. Smith, History of Cuckolds, 1:176–7, 224, 199, 211, 213; Smith’s Comical and Tragical History of the
Lives and Adventures of the Noted Bayliffs (1723) similarly pillories Cromwell and other Roundheads,
as well as early eighteenth-century Dissenters such as Burgess.
28. Ned Ward, The London Spy, ed. Paul Hyland, 4th ed. (1709; East Lansing, Mich., 1993), 15–16.
According to one late seventeenth-century pamphlet, “High-way-men for the most part . . . who never
were acquainted with an honest Trade . . . to make their Persons appear more formidable, and to gain
respect . . . dub one another Colonel, Major, or at least Captain, who never arrived to a greater height
than a Trooper disbanded, or at the utmost a Life-guard-man casheer’d for misdemeanour” (Jackson’s
Recantation [1674], [xxvi]). In Defoe’s novel Colonel Jacque (1722), the spurious hero and his two foster
brothers are all named John, and dubbed “Colonel,” “Major,” and “Captain” Jack, respectively.
29. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000), 325; see also
Alastair Bellany, “‘Rayling Rymes and Vaunting Verse’: Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England,
1603–1628,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin M. Sharpe and Peter Lake
(Stanford, Calif., 1993); Thomas Cogswell, “Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early
Stuart Political Culture,” Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1998): 303–26.
30. Andrew McRae, “The Verse Libel: Popular Satire in Early Modern England,” in Subversion and
Scurrility: Popular Discourse in Europe from 1500 to the Present, ed. Dermot Cavenagh and Tim Kirk
(Aldershot, U.K., 2000), 70; Fox, Oral and Literate Culture, 5–6.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
243
Dugaw has attributed some of the “sting” of John Gay’s early burlesques The WhatD’Ye-Call-It (1715) and Three Hours After Marriage (1717) to the fact that both works
self-consciously “adapt[ed] the forms and themes of plebeian ‘Mummery,’” and were
hence, not unlike highwayman literature, particularly insulting.31
It is surely not coincidental that many of the fictional victims of highway robbery were ritually humiliated in ways that were suggestive of traditional shaming rituals, such as charivaris or rough music, or riding the skimmington.32 The highwayman
William Joyce robs a lawyer and then canes him and breaks his sword—thus symbolically stripping him of his genteel status (CH 3:171). The Scottish highwayman Gilder
Roy supposedly robs Cromwell, shooting his servant and his horse, and then ties the
Lord Protector to an ass grazing nearby (CH 2:301). (Forcing someone to ride an ass
backward was a powerful shaming ritual, implying the person so shamed was a cuckold or a sodomite.) In another story the highwayman Captain Dudley meets with a justice of the peace and tells him to stand and deliver; when the latter attempts to resist,
Dudley shoots his horse and then ties the magistrate backward on another donkey
conveniently at hand, saying, “I know I offend against the Rules of Heraldry, in putting
Metal upon Metal [that is, an ass on an ass]; but as there’s no general Rule without an
Exception, I doubt not but all the Heralds will excuse this Soloecism committed in
their Art” (CH 2:7–8).
In a sense, then, Smith’s and Johnson’s highwaymen function as one-man charivaris, revealing citizens as rogues, gentlemen and courtiers as hypocrites, fine ladies as
whores. Charles II’s mistresses were particularly liable to being robbed on the highway,
and exposed as parasites on the public purse (a further reminder that the depredations
of state rogues and little villains differed only in scale). In one of Johnson’s accounts,
the highwayman Old Mobb tells the Duchess of Portsmouth, the French Catholic
Louise de Kéroualle, “I am King here, Madam, and I have a Whore to keep on the Publick Contributions, as well as King Charles” (GH 152). Smith’s version is more graphic,
with the highwayman responding to the duchess’s threat to “touch her if he durst” by
retorting: “I durst if I die for’t; therefore you Outlandish B——ch deliver; for as you
have no Commodity about you but what is French, I may answer, by Law, the Seizure of
what’s Prohibited by an Act of Parliament.” Old Mobb then “beginning to fall on board
her, in a very boisterous manner, Her grace quickly cry’d out for Quarters,” surrendering 200 pounds (CH 1:18–19). (The reference was to a 1678 act forbidding French goods
from entering English ports, but “commodity” was also slang for a woman’s genitals.)33
31. Dianne Dugaw, “Deep Play”: John Gay and the Invention of Modernity (Newark, Del., 2001),
142–43.
32. See, for instance, Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture,’”
Past & Present 105 (1984): 79–113; E. P. Thompson, “‘Rough Music’: Le charivari anglais,” Annales:
Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 27 (1972): 285–312; David Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold:
The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England,” in Order and Disorder in Early
Modern England, ed. Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge, 1985), 116–36; Fox, Oral and
Literate Culture, 66.
33. See An Act for raising Money by a Poll and otherwise to enable His Majestie to enter into an
actuall Warr against the French King and for prohibiting severall French Commodities, 30 Car. 2, c. 1,
Statutes of the Realm, ed. John Raithby, vol. 5, 1628–80 (London, 1819), 852–64, http://www.
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Not surprisingly, the king’s Protestant mistress Nell Gwynn fares better on the highway than her high-born Catholic rivals. When stopped by the Irish robber Patrick
O-Bryan, she proves herself to be not only a Protestant, but a “sharitable W—re,” cheerfully bestowing ten Guineas upon “Teague,” who then “rid away without doing any farther Damage” (LH 2:53).
Seventeenth-century picaresque literature occasionally featured transgressive
but largely sympathetic women as vehicles for satire—especially those who, by disguising themselves as men, could lay claim to such putative masculine attributes as valor,
honesty, frankness, and loyalty, thus both implicitly shaming male counterparts and,
often, challenging the sexual double standard.34 While in many respects Captain
Johnson’s account of the cross-dressing pirates Mary Read and Anne Bonny conformed to a similar sympathetic script, in Smith’s and Johnson’s highwayman stories,
cross-dressing also served as a metaphor for the falsity of appearances, the deception
and meretriciousness of courtiers. In one such episode, the highwayman Old Mobb,
dressed “in Woman’s Apparel,” meets up with a “certain Lord” who, “being amorously
inclin’d”—intent on “fufilling the Primary Command Increase and Multiply”—is easily
lured by the “Masculino-feminine Creature” into the bushes, where he makes an
astonishing discovery. “What a Plague’s the meaning of your wearing Breeches,
Madam [?]. Nothing (reply’d Old Mobb) but to put your Money in.” The highwayman
then robs the “Noble Peer” at gunpoint, leaving him bound hand and foot, and with
these words of wisdom: “You may now see, Sir, that Ill-luck may sometimes befal a
Courtier, who follows nothing but Inconstancy, admires nothing but Beauty, and honours nothing but Fortune” (LH 1:25–26).35
For many readers, “Increase and Multiply” would have resonated as a line from
Samuel Butler’s popular anti-Puritan mock-heroic poem Hudibras (much reprinted in
the wake of the Sacheverell affair), conjuring up the sanctimony and perfidy of the socalled Men of ’41 and the Good Old Cause. 36 It is possible, perhaps likely, that contemporaries would have lit upon that original Whig, Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of
Shaftesbury, whom many would have remembered as beginning his political career as
a Royalist and switching sides on numerous occasions for reasons that, however they
may have been consistent with his professed political principles, would have been
british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47471. In another of Smith’s ribald histories, Nell Gwynn
beards (as it were) her French Catholic rival by “taking up her Coats” and burning “with a Candle all of
the Hair off those Parts which Modesty obliges to Conceal.” Upon Kéroualle’s complaining to Charles
II, Nell offered up this defence: “May it please your Majesty, that as there is an Act of Parliament for
Burning all French Commodities, that are prohibited, she hoped he could not be Angry at her Care in
putting the Act in force” (Captain Alexander Smith, The School of Venus, Or, Cupid restor’d to Sight;
Being a History of Cuckolds and Cuckold-makers, 2 vols. [1716], 1:64).
34. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge, 1989); Bayman,
“Cross-Dressing and Pamphleteering,” 70; Melissa Mowry, “Thieves, Bawds, and Counterrevolutionary Fantasies: The Life and Death of Mrs. Mary Frith,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 5
(2005): 26.
35. For a discussion of male cross-dressing as a “resolutely heterosexual” performance, see David
Cressy, “Gender Trouble and Cross-Dressing in Early Modern England,” Journal of British Studies 35
(October 1996): 455–58.
36. Samuel Butler, Hudibras: The Third and Last Part (1678), 143.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
245
viewed with some cynicism, and not just by Tories. Readers of Smith’s introduction
to his second volume may have discerned in what passes for a hint as to the author’s
true identity—that is, that he was not alone in “Throwing off the Gown to take up
the Sword”—yet another inside joke (LH 2:v). Similar words had been attributed to
Shaftesbury upon being dismissed from office by Charles II: “It is only laying down my
gown, and putting on my sword”—ostensibly meaning he would henceforth carry out
his duties as a private gentleman rather than as a public official, but words that would
have immediately evoked memories of the Rye House or “Protestant Plot,” conveying
(certainly to Tory readers) sinister implications of duplicity, treason, and assassination. Not least, readers may well have been reminded of a more contemporary Whig
politician, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, against whom similar charges of
ambition, self-interest, and “Inconstancy” could be leveled.37
The fact that the highwayman can subject his victim to insults performs a leveling function (not unlike the medieval literary device of “flyting”38), reducing the
moral distance between them. Early eighteenth-century highwayman stories abound
with sexual and scatological imagery and themes. Sometimes the crudity of the humor
seems wholly gratuitous. One 1726 account describes how the robber John Trippuck,
while making his escape from prison through a sewage pipe, ends up coming out of a
“House of Office” upon which a lusty widow was newly “set.” Our hero “seizes” the
woman from “behind,” but later assures her that he was an honest man “come to seek
Protection under your Roof ” and apologizes: “instead of handling your Breasts, I have
through a Mistake seiz’d upon your Buttocks.” The widow agrees to marry Trippuck,
who had hopes “of bettering his Fortune, by embarking himself on a firm built Bottom” or, rather, a “substantial Shopkeeper.” Of course Trippuck ran through the
widow’s money in less than a year, which led her to “[curse] the Day that ever she saw
him, wishing she had been in her Coffin when she sat upon the House of Office, or that
Death had seiz’d upon her Heart when Jack seiz’d upon her Breech.”39
Other scatological episodes were more satirically pointed. We are told that
the highwayman Zachary Howard, upon finding “Old Noll”(Oliver Cromwell) in
his “Bed-Chamber” in “a praying Posture,” knocked him down and held a gun to his
chest, striking “the Republican Hero with such a Pannick Fear, that he permitted the
Assaulter to do what he pleas’d,” which included not only being robbed, bound hand
and foot, but even having a “Close Stool, which was pretty well fill’d with the nauseous
Excrements of this much more nauseous Rebel . . . clapt . . . on his Head.”40 Such examples of scatological humor, or what Bahktin has termed “grotesque realism” clearly
served a socially leveling function, “using one universal, never-failing technique of
subversion”: that is, “the physiological exigencies to which mortal beings are subject,”
37. ODNB, s.v. “Cooper, Anthony Ashley, first earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683),” by Tim Harris, last
modified January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6208.
38. Iain Macleod Higgins, “Tit for Tat: The Canterbury Tales and ‘The Flyting of Dunbar and
Kennedy,’” Exemplaria 16 (2004): 169.
39. Captain Alexander Smith, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Famous Jonathan Wild. Together
with the History and Lives, of Modern Rogues (1726), 235, 237–38.
40. Ibid., 152–53.
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and reducing even the most eminent of robbery victims to a kind of “bodily democracy,” in which distinctions of rank can appear arbitrary.41 As Mark Jenner has noted,
scatological images figured prominently in Restoration attacks on the Rump Parliament, “reproducing in textual terms the ridicule of punishments such as the pillory”
and suggesting a “lack of bowel control” that “infantilized the Rumpers, alluding to
their rebellion against their royal father, and emphasizing their inability to rule the
nation.”42
While the Cromwell story is consistent with the generally Tory bent of highwayman lives, the net of scatological humor was spread wide. Several of Smith’s and Johnson’s characters soil themselves, either in terror of being robbed, or from shock
induced by some other prank of the highwayman’s devising. For instance, when
Claude Duvall supposedly threw a mastiff dog wearing horns down a chimney in the
midst of a boisterous country wake, all the revelers fled from what they took to be
the devil, falling “Higledy-pigledy, Heads and Tails . . . the Womens Coats over their
Heads, and the Mens Noses some of them in their Breeches,” a “Covetous” “Old
Farmer” soiling his breeches in his haste to escape (CH 1:228–29). Obscene stories
often served a dual function of titillating the reader and playing to anti-clerical or antipapist prejudices. In one of Smith’s more ribald stories, one Captain Dudley pays a visit
to Rome, where, on “a strange Whim,” he purchases the cadaver of an executed female
criminal, and tries to pass off “the Hairy Circle of her Merkin” as St Peter’s beard. This
spurious holy relic supposedly passes muster after a cardinal, and finally the pope
itself, examine it closely by clapping it on their chins and kissing it reverently (CH 2:6).
Another ribald prank played by several rogue heroes involves inducing calves or lambs
who mistake the members of sleeping clergymen or Catholic monks for their
“Mammy’s teat,” and end by exposing the rudely awakened cleric to the ridicule of all
and sundry (CH 2:50–51). Traditional misogynist and prurient themes often intersected with more explicitly High Church satire. Several of Smith’s highwaymen rob
three female Quakers, “stripping them stark naked” and tying them to a tree; upon one
of the “holy Sisters” asking “ye Men of Belial . . . the meaning of all this Violence,” their
leader Andrew Baynes explains: “Nothing at all, beloved Ones, but only to make your
Bodies as light as your souls.” Baynes’s comrades, inclined to untie the “three Yeas and
Nays” (they happened to be “tolerably handsome”), are overridden by Baynes: “They
shall not be unty’d, for though I’m of no Religion my self, yet I mortally hate a Quaker,
or any other Precisian, because he’s a demure creature, only full of oral Sanctity, and
mental Impiety” (LH 2:172–73).
Biting the Biter, Cuckolding the Courtier
One of the central themes of such literature was that of “biting the biter,” that is, the
notion that it was no crime to con, outwit, or despoil those who preyed on others
41. Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 235; Douglas, Implicit Meanings, 150–51; see also Aileen Douglas,
Uneasy Sensation: Smollett and the Body (Chicago, 1995), xviii, 7; Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London, 1986), 106.
42. Mark Jenner, “The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England,” Past & Present 177 (2002): 98.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
247
(lawyers, courtiers, crooked tradesmen; the OED defines “bite” as “to deceive, to overreach, ‘take in’”). A 1712 issue of The Spectator discussed how, in recent years “the Gallants of the Town,” “Shallow Fops” who “admire everything that struts in Vogue,” had
appropriated the cant “phrase of Biting” from sharpers, or confidence men. It became
fashionable for these young swells to take more credulous auditors in by means of various outrageous claims, and when they “bit” (or appeared to take the claim seriously),
the biter would yell out “Bite!” in triumph (as if to say, “Gotcha!”). The editors cite an
example of one wit who tells a young man from Yorkshire (that is, a country yokel),
that he has just returned bearing bad news from the country that, “on Tuesday last,
just after Dinner. . . . your Father fell down dead in an Apoplexy. The Youth shew’d the
filial Sorrow which he ought—Upon which the witty Man cry’d, Bite, there was nothing in all this”!
If criminal cant or slang could be appropriated by fops in high life, this did not
prevent those in low life from biting back, further adding to the trenchancy of the
satire. The editors conclude by telling a story of a surgeon who had gone to Newgate to
bargain with the condemned prisoners for possession of their “Carkass[es]” (for the
purposes of dissection) after they had been hanged. He is just about to conclude a bargain with “a little Fellow, who refused Twelve Shillings, and insisted upon Fifteen for
his Body,” when a lusty convict (William Johnson, alias Holloway), condemned for
murdering one of his jailers (Richard Spurling), interrupted: “Look you, Mr. Surgeon,
that dry little Fellow, who has been half-starved all his Life, and is now half-dead with
Fear, cannot answer your Purpose.” His own body, he claimed, was as sound as e’er a
Bullock in any of the Markets. Come, for Twenty Shillings I am your Man.—Says the
Surgeon, Done, there’s a Guinea — This witty Rogue took the Money, and assoon [sic]
as he had it in his Fist, cries, Bite, I am to be hang’d in Chains” (that is, gibbeted, a
posthumous punishment reserved for heinous crimes, such as robbery accompanied
with murder). Here the surgeon, “the good honest fellow,” is seen as a vulture, preying
on carcasses, and deserves what he gets—swindled out of his money.43
The common trope of “biting the biter” was readily adaptable to satiric programs. It was a frequent refrain of early eighteenth-century newspapers, pamphlets,
and plays (especially in the wake of the South Sea Bubble) that “to deceive the deceiver
is no deceit”; “to cheat the Cheater is no Fraud”; “to bite the Biter is not Fraud, but Wit”;
“no mortal can deride us if we a biter bite.”44 Criminals’ robberies of lawyers, courtiers,
and crooked tradesmen are sometimes characterized as a species of “rob thief.”45 In the
words of one account of the highwayman Claude Duvall, “Duvall was a professed Robber, and what is any Court Favourite, but a picker of the common People’s Pockets, so
that it was only two Sharpers endeavouring to outsharp one another” (GH 93). It also
43. The Spectator, October 8, 1712.
44. CH 2:344; “Gentleman Harry” [Henry Simms], Hanging no Dishonour. Being a Modest Attempt
to Prove That such Persons as have the Honour to make their Exit at the Triple-Tree are not always the
great Villains in the Nation (1747), 12; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, December 31, 1720; The
Quaker’s Opera (1728), 19.
45. James Guthrie, Ordinary of Newgate, His Account of the Behaviour, Confessions and Dying
Speeches of the Condemned Criminals that were Executed at Tyburn on Tuesday the 13th of April, 1743
(London, 1743), 35.
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appealed to the basic human predilection for the underdog, someone who could turn
the tables on someone who was attempting to prey upon him or her. It even appealed
to principles of natural law, in the sense that everyone had the right to live, and to selfdefense. Many of Smith’s and Johnson’s highwaymen turn the tables on their own natural enemies. Sir John Falstaff and his band of robbers rob the hangman and “hang’d
him on a Tree, as being a dangerous Fellow to Sparks of their Profession” (CH 1:11).
“Old Mobb” robs the notorious “Hanging Judge” Jeffreys (of “Black Assizes” fame),
and threatens to charge a constable with him, as the judge had put the highwayman “in
Bodily Fear” several months before, at the Hartford Assizes (GH 153).
Sometimes the humor is less self-evident. When William Cady robs a woman
who is reluctant to hand over her wedding ring, he roundly insults her as a “whindling
Bitch” and a “Whore by License.” When the woman responds by swallowing the ring,
Cady shoots “her thro’ the Head . . . ript her open, and took the Ring out of her body,
saying at the same Time to her Husband . . . Your Wife’s a Bite I see, but I think now I
have Bit the Biter.’”46 Here we see another feature of this literature: that is, its tendency
not only to juxtapose people from different social backgrounds in unlikely or ridiculous situations, but its rapid and often jarring transition from bathroom humor, lighthearted pranks, and frolics, to moments of brutal and casual violence. This violence is
both criminal—rapes and murders—and judicial—the invariably anti-climactic execution of the highwayman protagonist (in part a function of the fact that the crime for
which the criminal is hanged, and the date of the hanging, are often the only factual
details inserted in an otherwise picaresque and fictionalized account). The same Irish
highwayman who provides comic relief by robbing Nell Gwynn, for example, goes on
to participate in the horrific rape-murder for which he is executed. Lincoln Faller has
seen the “unpredictable movement of Smith’s text” as a strategy to make his otherwise
“impoverished” and repetitive “narratives more interesting. . . . A sense of risk can
heighten pleasure, especially when the pleasure has something furtive about it in the
first place.”47 But I would argue that the fact that gentlemen and ladies, instead of commanding the deference and obedience of blackguard men, are suddenly vulnerable to
humiliation, even sexual or physical assault, is central to the humor of such stories.
This kind of social inversion conforms to the classic joke structure, in which a hidden
and alternative informal pattern displaces a normative and formal one, and those who
should have control conspicuously lose it in the presence of social inferiors who, in
turn, assume a position of power.48
There is another reason why the brutal murder of the woman who swallowed
her wedding ring may have been funny to contemporaries: according to traditional
notions of gender politics, women were by definition biters (as the epigram, from
Smith’s canting dictionary, graphically illustrates), and marriage is the bite, represented by the wedding ring. The highwayman Thomas Wynne, who supposedly retaliates against a lady’s maid who had scorned his suit by biting her “in the most tender
46. Smith, Memoirs, 133.
47. Faller, Turned to Account, 164.
48. Douglas, Implicit Meanings, 150–51.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
249
and sensible Part” is in this sense only “biting the biter” (CH 3:34). Not only jilts and
bawds but respectable matrons alike are seen as “biters” in that they use men’s sexual
urges to entrap them. Nor were unmarried women exempt: Jack Addison violently
robs a chambermaid, heedless of her protests and pleas, saying, “You covetous B—h,
how loth are you to lend an honest Man a little money, to do him a Kindness; when, I
warrant you, if you had a good swinging clap now, you would divide it so equally
betwixt your — [master?] and his Foot-men, as if you had cut out the getting of it by a
Thread.” The fact that Addison takes the rather large sum of twenty-three shillings
from her tends to reinforce doubts as to her sexual honesty (LH 2:199). Even more significant is the fact that she is identified as the maid of the Duchess of Marlborough,
Sarah Churchill; as with the attacks on Charles II’s mistresses, readers would have been
reminded of the dangers of female favorites dabbling in politics. Indeed, it is tempting
to see Smith’s satirical assaults on the Duchesses of Portsmouth and Cleveland as serving principally as an attack on the more contemporary duchess, also elevated to her
rank by a besotted monarch.49
For the most part, however, violence against women is confined to sexual
assaults that seem to be primarily about ridiculing the men to whom the women
belong. When the highwayman Jack Withrington bids a man and wife stand, and the
former refuses to hand over their money, Withrington then “shot the Horse on which
they both rid, and swore, that as he deny’d him his Money, he would take his Wife; so
forcing her into an adjacent Copse, and acting a Man’s Part by her, he restor’d her to her
Husband again, from whom taking eleven or twelve Guineas, he said, This is no more
than my Due, for I am not oblig’d to do your Drudgery for nothing” (LH 2:100). In a
similarly awful story, one of Smith’s housebreakers robs the house of a tailor who had
been tried for sodomy, leaving the latter’s wife tied up with her husband’s “Yard” (his
work tool, but also slang for his penis) “in her Vessel of Generation” (LH 3:298).
Women in such accounts are typically represented as sexually insatiable and
undiscriminating. In a typical story in which a woman at an inn accidentally gets into
bed with the highwayman Claude Duvall instead of her husband, we are told that “Our
gallant quickly discovered her Mistake, and, by his vigour, she soon perceived the
same; however, she was not so ill-natur’d as to leave him immediately” (GH 94). When
the Quaker highwayman Jacob Halsey propositions a gentlewoman (“My pretty
Lamb . . . an Insurrection of an unruly Member, obliges me to make use of you upon an
extraordinary Occasion”), the joke is in the incongruity of the situation; the subsequent rape is seen as incidental, even gallant (“after having surfeited himself with
unlawful Pleasure, he sent her about her Business, without so much as searching her
Pockets, or taking [her] Gold Watch”).50 Another story that may fail to amuse modern
49. Rachel Carnell has noted that “anti-Whig discourse” frequently “took the form of personal
attack against powerful individual Whigs” such as Sarah Churchill; Partisan Politics, 29. See also
Kathryn R. King’s discussion of the “nasty ballad campaign” sponsored by Sarah Churchill, directed at
the queen’s Tory favorite Abigail Masham, the “Dirty Chamber-Maid” and “Slut of State,” in her “Political Verse and Satire: Monarchy, Party and Female Political Agency,” in Women and Poetry, 1660–1750,
ed. Sarah Prescott and David E. Shuttleton (Basingstoke, U.K., 2003), 217.
50. Smith, Memoirs, 143.
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readers, but again taps into the apparently inexhaustibly hilarious trope of female sexual insatiability, was that of the cutpurse Simon Fletcher, who, seeing a raw “Country
Fellow” watching the performance of some ballad singers with “his Balls hanging out
of his Cod-piece, as wide as King Henry’s, and Simon supposing it to be his Purse
. . . cut ’em with a sudden Jerk, and slip’d away.” A crowd quickly formed around the
unfortunate countryman, who loudly lamented the loss of “good Pair of B—ks, for
which I shall have more a Noise with my Wife, than if I had lost a Hundred Pounds”
(CH 2:187).
Much of the humor of such stories rests on the tenuousness of male control over
female sexuality. In one of Captain Johnson’s stories, a woman makes a deathbed confession to her husband about the paternity of her twelve children. The eldest, she concedes, might be his, “but for the rest, my Dear, (said she with a deep Sigh) I am afraid
you are just as much their Father, as the Kings of England have been Kings of France
for some hundreds of Years past; that is, you know very well, in Name only” (GH 308).
This seems to be the lesson of what was undoubtedly the rudest of all of Smith’s and
Johnson’s stories: that of Isaac Atkinson, the Tow-Wow Setter, or the Tow-Wow Adjustor, which made its debut in Smith’s fifth edition and was reprinted in Johnson’s 1734
highwayman collection (but dropped from his second, 1742, edition). The highwayman Isaac Atkinson happens to be peering into the bedroom window of an earl and his
lady when “an Amorous Fit seiz’d his Honour, and he mounted the Saddle for the Performance of Family Duty: Though his Lordship was often in before, yet he could not
readily find his Way: Upon which Atkinson heard him say, I vow, Madam, I would give
up the five Hundred Pounds . . . which now lies in my Escritoire, provided I could have
your Tow-wow mov’d but one Inch higher.”
Atkinson waits until the earl is absent to pay a call upon his lady wife, telling her
he has been sent by her husband as “by profession, a Tow-wow setter” who has come to
raise hers one inch, for the small fee of £500. “The Reader must dispense with a particular Account of his Procedure: ’Tis sufficient that he performed his Office in the best
Manner, so that a Lady of the prime Quality in England had no Room to complain.”
The enterprising Atkinson is then approached by the Chambermaid, who says, “Sir, I
understand you are a Tow-wow Setter; now Thomas the Coachman has informed me,
that mine is not as it should be; if, therefore, you could rectify it a little, I would willingly give you all the Money I have by me, which is about 20 l.” After Atkinson has
obliged the chambermaid he is similarly petitioned by the cook, who offers him only
5 l—“Quoth Isaac, I don’t make a common Practice of rectifying Tow-wows for such a
small Sum; however, I consider your Circumstances, and as what I shall perform may
be of Service to you I would not deny such a Favour, if you had nothing to bestow.”
Needless to say, the earl returns home soon afterward to find he has been cuckolded,
on an epic scale (GH 114–15; see also CH 2:173–78).
But the joke here is not limited to female insatiability (and credulity), nor of the
sexual incompetence of the paterfamilias (who cannot find his way). Just as charges of
being cuckolded were central to traditional shaming rituals, cuckoldry was a powerful
inversion in highwayman “lives”
251
political metaphor for a household, and a world, out of order.51 It is also worth mentioning that the image of the cuckolded Whig was a staple of Tory polemical humor,
both in the “Cit-Cuckolding” comedies of the Restoration and in later Jacobite literature.52 Nor is it too farfetched to speculate that readers may have recognized, or
thought they recognized, the hapless cuckold in question. Smith’s account describes
the cuckold as an “Earl,” and places him in the early to mid-seventeenth century
(Atkinson is supposed to have been executed in 1640). Robert Devereux, the third Earl
of Essex, the son of Elizabeth’s favorite, is probably best known today as the commander of the Parliamentary Army in the first phase of the English Civil War. He
would have been just as familiar to contemporaries, however, as the most famous
cuckold of the seventeenth century. His first wife, the notorious beauty Frances, née
Howard, successfully petitioned to have her marriage to Essex annulled on the
grounds of his alleged impotency, an impotency to which a dozen or so witnesses publicly testified. Essex subsequently married one Elizabeth Paulet, and this second marriage likewise disintegrated after Elizabeth also became implicated in an adulterous
relationship. Essex discovered his wife was pregnant and declared that if the baby were
born before a certain date (November 5, 1636), he would own the child, but not if it
were born afterward. The scandal engrossed the court, and hundreds of bets were
placed on the possible birthday of the child—which, as it turned out, fell exactly on that
momentous Protestant date of November 5. Essex decided to honor his promise to
acknowledge the child, who died a month later. Interestingly, while trying to prove the
adultery of this second wife, Essex’s brother reputedly attempted to spy on her by
standing on a ladder and peering into her bedroom window (like Isaac Atkinson).53
For contemporaries, it may have been funny guessing who this cuckold might
be and funnier to be in the know, and perhaps funnier still to make analogies to contemporary early eighteenth-century Whig figures, the political heirs to these midseventeenth-century Parliamentarians. It may be significant that the Isaac Atkinson
story was added to the second volume of Smith’s Lives in 1719, when Sir Robert Walpole was already a prominent Whig statesman (if, for the moment, languishing in the
political wilderness). By 1719 Sir Robert Walpole had also been estranged from his
wife, Lady Catherine, for over ten years, and she was alleged to have had numerous
affairs—one supposedly with the Prince of Wales, with Walpole’s tacit acquiescence
(almost certainly untrue, but a rumor that would have advertised Walpole’s servility to
the Hanoverians, to say the least). When Catherine gave birth to a son, Horace, over
ten years younger than his siblings, in 1717, speculation raged that Sir Robert, whom
the child reputedly did not resemble, was not the father.54 While Walpole shared few
51. Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (New
York, 1993), 102; Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven
(New York, 1999).
52. Anita Pacheco, “Reading Toryism in Aphra Behn’s Cit-Cuckolding Comedies,” Review of English Studies 55, no. 222 (2004): 690–708; Carnell, Partisan Politics, 29.
53. ODNB, “Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex (1591–1646),” by John Morrill, last modifed
January 2008, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/7566.
54. J. H. Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The Making of a Statesman (London, 1956), 257–58, 161n.
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characteristics with the Earl of Essex (certainly the former’s virility was beyond dispute), linking the Whig politician to the ineffectual parliamentary commander and
notorious cuckold would have had comic potential. In the context of contemporary
gender politics, an ineffectual husband equaled an incompetent statesman.55 Was
Walpole a failed patriarch, a man unable to control his wife and household and, ultimately, the country?
The Grotesque Political Body: The World Turned Upside Down
As I have suggested, one of the important ways in which critics of the Hanoverian
regime attempted to discredit it—along with the placemen, stockjobbers, lawyers, and
monied classes that were believed to benefit from the new Whig dispensation—was to
associate it with its political forbears the Parliamentarians and to reopen the wounds,
less than two generations old, of the English Civil War and Interregnum. In this context, “the world turned upside down” was a very bad thing, conjuring up dreadful
specters of regicide, radical sectarianism (enthusiasm), and the failed republican
experiment—known in its most maligned manifestation, significantly, as the “rule
of the Rump.” To the gentlemen and women of Augustan England, as Richard Braverman has pointed out, the “threat of the grotesque body” acted as a metaphor for
the “revolutionary threat from below” that had shaken the foundations of the midseventeenth-century polity, and continued to cast a long shadow over early and mideighteenth-century politics.56 And just as the mid-seventeenth-century republican
experiment was viewed as dangerously topsy-turvy, the “new money” of the Robinocracy was seen as inherently grotesque and corrupt.57
Despite our own modern sympathy with all things transgressive, it is nonetheless important not to lose sight of the fact that, to contemporaries, “the world turned
upside down” was essentially an abomination; in other words, a world in which the
rational parts were dominated by the “lower bodily stratum,” to borrow Bahktin’s
term. This was often expressed in terms of the unnaturalness of the government of
women, the “disorderly [sex] par excellence,” representing an inversion of and a threat
to rational self-control.58 Ned Ward describes how the female rope-dancers at
Bartholomew’s Fair, who walked on their hands upside down, “mightily pleased” the
narrator, “for it made ’em seem to have a due sense of the ills done by their tongues, to
degrade which, they turn’d em downwards, giving the preeminence to their more
55. Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780
(Berkeley, Calif., 1996), 198; for a general overview of the masculine anxieties and preoccupations, and
challenges to, normative “patriarchal masculinity” during this period, see Alexandra Shepard, “From
Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen, circa 1500–1700,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005):
281–95.
56. Richard Braverman, “Satiric Embodiments: Butler, Swift, Sterne,” in Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire, ed. James E. Gill (Knoxville, Tenn., 1995), 78–79.
57. J. Douglas Canfield, “The Critique of Capitalism and the Retreat into Art in Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera and Fielding’s Author’s Farce,” in Cutting Edges, ed. Gill, 320–34; Michael Denning, “Beggars
and Thieves,” Literature and History 1 (1982): 47.
58. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif., 1975), 124;
for a more recent discussion of gender inversion and “camp,” see Dugaw, “Deep Play,” chap. 9.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
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deserving parts, for which reason they practised to walk with their arses upwards,”
thus “honour[ing]” the most “useful” part of a woman: her “tail” rather than her
“head.” In contrast, the narrator viewed the servile male courtship of fashionable
ladies promenading in St James’s Park as evidence of a “topsy-turvy” world, in which
“the laws of the Creation were greatly transgressed” in that “the ladies looked like
undaunted heroes . . . and the gentlemen like a parcel of fawning, flattering fops, that
could bear cuckoldom with patience.”59
It is thus fitting that when Smith ostensibly apologizes for the “profane” language of the highwaymen in his collection, he invokes a scatological image. The
“Words. . . . of these wicked Offenders . . . are always so Odious, Detestable, and Foul,
that some, as little acquainted with a God as they, would be apt to conclude that Nature
spoil’d ’em in the Making, by setting their Mouths at the wrong end of their Bodies.”60
By delivering social critique from the vantage point of grotesque realism (bottom up),
authors and audiences could have it both ways: they could ridicule various individuals
and groups in high life while simultaneously impugning and dissociating themselves
from the mode in which such satire was delivered (that is, the criminal or blackguard
protagonist as vehicle of social inversion). As Terry Castle has argued in the context of
eighteenth-century masquerade, rituals of social inversion could provide a means of
simultaneously acting out certain prurient impulses and maintaining social distance:
“indulging in the scenery of transgression while seeming to maintain didactic probity.”61 What Judith Frank has referred to as “coy ambivalence towards plebeian utterance” on the part of the upper classes62 could translate into polite fascination with
various “blackguard” mannerisms or expressions, such as cant or criminal jargon,
seen in the late eighteenth century “as worthy of jocular imitation by fashionable
men.”63
But, as Natalie Zemon Davis and Robert Scribner have famously argued, the
mere act of holding up official norms to ridicule, “to submit [them] to observability,”
can be inherently subversive, serving as a reminder that those in power do not live
up to the standard of behavior that they demand of others and that their social underlings are punished for transgressing (this obviously suggests the old judicial double
standard—one law for the rich and another for the poor—which was a staple of
much of this literature).64 While Mardi Gras celebrations were not part of eighteenthcentury English culture, nonetheless satirical literature, ballads, and plays arguably
59. Ward, London Spy, 183, 137–38.
60. Smith, Lives of the Highway-men, 1:iii.
61. Terry Castle, “The Carnivalization of Eighteenth-Century English Narrative,” Publications of
the Modern Language Association 99, no. 5 (1984): 912; see also Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 102–4.
62. Judith Frank, Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor
(Stanford, Calif., 1997), 2; see also Stallybrass and White, Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 6.
63. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, U.K., 2001),
136; Janet Sorenson, “Vulgar Tongues: Canting Dictionaries and the Language of the People in 18thc
Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 3 (2004): 437.
64. Davis, Society and Culture, 97, 123; Scribner, “Reformation, Carnival and the World Turned
Upside-Down,” Social History 3 (October 1978): 303–29.
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performed much the same function of shaming those in positions of power, submitting them “to observability.” And in the context of the burgeoning public sphere of the
early eighteenth century, print could be read in ways the original authors of texts
would have never intended or imagined.65 As Michel de Certeau reminds us, “consumption” does not necessarily mean “‘becoming similar to’ what one absorbs” but
rather “making something similar to what one is, making it one’s own, appropriating
or reappropriating.”66 Both the dynamism and the slipperiness of the eighteenthcentury public sphere meant that even “real-life” criminals themselves could appropriate the satirical tropes of the Augustan literati, portraying themselves as “real
McHeaths,” modern-day Robin Hoods or Jacobite “Captains.”67 Certainly, attempts to
adapt images and practices from popular culture both to increase the pungency of
humor and broaden its social purchase could backfire on socially conservative
authors. As Laura Lunger Knoppers has suggested, mid-seventeenth-century Royalist
satirists, by “disseminating in print” representations of “Cromwell the brewer” as a
comically low figure, “may have inadvertently helped produce the very social inversion that they deplored.68
The theme of biting the biter could prove infinitely destabilizing, inviting endless comparisons and ultimately a kind of moral relativism: wasn’t everyone a biter, a
rogue, or a whore? Normative and subversive messages alike dissolve into apparent
meaninglessness as the biter not only bites back but is himself bitten in return. Smith
recounts several stories in which robbers steal boxes and bags that they presume contain coins, plate, or jewels but in fact contain the corpses of animals or babies. Dick
Adams robs a traveler of rich booty, and then exchanges coats with him, forgetting
that he had pocketed the goods in his own coat beforehand (CH 1:85). Another highwayman stops a Welshman (meant to be funny in itself), who convinces his would-be
robber to fire his musket into “Taffy[’s]” coat so that his master would believe he had
been robbed, only to rob the robber when the highwayman’s bullets were exhausted
(CH 2:211). The highwayman Jack Bird was so humiliated after being bested by a pilot
who had lost both his hands in battle but who managed to “maul” his would-be robber
so “grievously with his wooden Stumps” that he was “almost in the mind to live honest” (LH 2:125–27). The highwayman Thomas Jones encounters a “one Mr. Storey an
Attorney” who, returning home from a night of heavy drinking, had stopped by the
side of the road “to untruss a point.” Jones collars the drunken lawyer, who warns him,
“Truly I’m brim full, therefore take care what you do, Sir, for if you stir me but ever so
little, I shall run all over”; when the highwayman, undeterred, continues to demand
Storey’s money, the latter “giving a great Belch . . . spew’d full in his Face and Eyes.”
(The bitten biter has the last bite, finally giving “Storey’s Pockets a Vomit by taking six
65. See, for instance, Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France,
trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 7.
66. Michel de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 166.
67. Andrea McKenzie, “The Real Macheath? Social Satire, Appropriation and Eighteenth-Century
English Criminal Biography,” Huntington Library Quarterly 69 (2006): 581–605.
68. Laura Lunger Knoppers, “‘Sing old Noll the Brewer’: Royalist Satire and Social Inversion,
1648–64,” The Seventeenth Century 15, no. 1 (2000): 47.
inversion in highwayman “lives”
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Pounds odd Money out of ’em”; LH 2:88). Numerous of Smith’s highwaymen are bitten
by prostitutes who rob them, either after or in lieu of the expected sexual transaction
(in cant, “buttock and twang” and “buttock and file,” respectively). At a Paris brothel,
Will Bew falls through a booby-trapped “close-stool,” landing “up to the Arm-Pits in
Sir-Reverence,” while the “Strumpet” with whom he had spent the night decamped
with his breeches and money (CH 1:103). In a similar episode the robber Stephen
Bunce went to a “Bawdy-House” where “he lit into a Strumpet’s Company, call’d, for
her great Bulk like a Colossus, the Royal Sovereign”—a cruel jab at the overweight
Queen Anne—“who pick’t his Pockets of 20 Pounds and vanish’d away . . . in the Twinkling of an Eye” (CH 1:176–77). Here the Tory satire degenerates—or so it seems—into
a joke at the expense of the Tory monarch herself, although the principal target is more
likely the queen’s erstwhile favorite, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.69
We are left with a question that may be beyond the scope of this essay, if nonetheless one well worth asking: does satire, especially broadly oppositional satire,
mean—that is, do or change—anything? Scholars of early modern England have
argued persuasively that criticisms of corruption and popery in high places voiced (via
print, manuscript, or oral transmission) in the nascent early seventeenth-century public sphere contributed to the outbreak of Civil War,70 but it is harder to make a similar
case for the tangible political impact of Augustan highwayman lives. It could be argued
that highwayman satire, by keeping alive an attack on the Whig oligarchy, helped sustain a political consciousness that would express itself in more radical terms under
Wilkes and his supporters from the 1760s on. This however seems unlikely, judging
from the fact that the more overt political elements are gradually leached out of the
later highwayman collections, with prefaces omitting references to “state villains” or—
as was increasingly the case—with prefaces omitted altogether. It may well be that the
anti-Whig and anti-Dissenter humor of highwayman accounts appealed broadly
enough to make audiences laugh, but lacked the force and hard political currency of
anti-Catholicism and anti-Jacobitism (seen until well into the middle of the eighteenth
century as very real threats), suggesting—depressingly, if unsurprisingly—that, in politics, fear trumps humor.
Did the open-endedness of eighteenth-century satire lend itself to political
inertia rather than agency, a lesson perhaps for our own supposedly postmodern consumer age? Certainly the highwayman collections of the early and mid-eighteenth
century ultimately present a critique of the Whig oligarchy so broad as to be easily construed as a rejection of party altogether. It may be significant that one 1725 dictionary of
cant (criminal slang) devotes a large section of its preface to tracing the origins of both
Whigs and Tories “to the same Source; viz. The Refuse and common Vagabonds of the
69. However tempting to think that this is an early reference to the (also overweight) Robert
Walpole, immortalized in a 1740 print by George Bickham as the “English Colossus,” the reference is
more likely to Marlborough, butt of the satirical pamphlet Oliver’s Pocket Looking-Glass, New Fram’d
and Clean’d, To give a clear View of the Great Modern Colossus (1712).
70. Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, “Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England,” Journal
of British Studies 45 (2006): 270–92; for a recent critique of this position, however, see Jason Peacey,
“Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth-Century England,” History Compass 5, no. 1 (2007): 85–110.
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three Nations,” concluding that “After this, every Man who calls himself Whig or Tory,
must needs be asham’d of his Origins, and blush at such a ridiculous Distinction.”71 But
even if such distinctions may have been meaningless in the context of a world in which
everyone was a biter, a rogue, or a whore, early and mid-eighteenth-century Englishmen and women could nonetheless console themselves that there were worse things.
When in the 1726 comedy The Biter, the ridiculous East-India merchant Sir Timothy
Tallapoy tells the “biting Squire” Pinch that “Biters” were “worse than Popery, Slavery,
Presbitery, Rebellion, Plague, Fire, Famine, and a standing Army to boot,” this was
meant after all not only to raise a laugh at the incongruous comparison, but to put
things into perspective.72
andrea mckenzie is an associate professor of history at the University of
Victoria, Canada. She is the author of Tyburn’s Martyrs: Execution in England,
1670–1770 (2007), and she has published numerous articles on crime, punishment,
and print culture in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.
71. A New Canting Dictionary: Comprehending All the Terms, Antient and Modern, Used in the
Several Tribes of Gypsies, Beggars, Shoplifters, High-waymen, Foot-Pads, and all other Clans of Cheats
and Villains (1725), [xi].
72. Nicholas Rowe, The Biter. A Comedy, 3rd ed. (1726).