Highway Robbery and Property Circulation in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives

Highway Robbery and Property Circulation in Eighteenth-Century English NarrativesPatrick Parrinder We retrench the superfluities of mankind. The world is avaricious, and I hate avarice. A covetous fellow, like a jackdaw, steals what he was never made to enjoy, for the sake of hiding it. These are the robbers of mankind, for money was made for the free-hearted and generous: and where is the injury of taking from another what he hath not the heart to make use of?1 Mat of the Mint in The Beggar's Opera Part ofthe highwayman's traditional defence is that all property originates in theft and that society is hypocritical in pursuing petty thieves. Introducing his collection of highwaymen's lives in 1734, Captain Charles Johnson asserts that a "universal History of Robbers" would be virtually tantamount to the "general History of all Nations," and that "even in Great Britain, where Property is better secur'd than anywhere else in the Universe," robbery is endemic—but only the "little Villains" tend to get caught.2 In The Beggar's Opera Mat of the Mint maintains that those who 1 John Gay, The Beggar's Opera, The Beggar's Opera and Other Eighteenth-Century Plays, ed. John Hampden (London: Dent; New York: Dutton, 1964), p. 127. References are to this edition. 2 Capt. Charles Johnson, A General History of the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street-Robbers, & C. (London: Janeway, 1734), p. 1. References are to this edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 13, Number 4, July 2001 510 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION "retrench the superfluities of mankind" are the unacknowledged benefactors of the rest of society, since they alone understand the proper function of money. However tongue-in-cheek it may be, this argument relies on the notion of property circulation which is one of the fundamental categories of eighteenth-century economic analysis.3 Macheath and his gang both stand for free circulation and deliver it as well. Thomas Hobbes had earlier observed that money circulates around the social Commonwealth with the same nourishing effect as the circulation of blood in the body. The interruption of free circulation by monopolies and the hoarding of wealth is a "Disease" akin to physical inflammation or pleurisy.4 Daniel Defoe, among others, made similar claims about the circulation oftrade. In Defoe's version, the "body" within which circulation occurs is not an abstract metaphor but the physical terrain of Great Britain. His map ofnational circulation, so to speak, is one in which "The Roads are the Arteries that convey, and the Manufactures, Provisions, and Produce of the whole, flow thro' them, to the general Supply of every Part."5 From the robber's "upside-down" point of view, the criminal economy was a necessary part of this circulating process, but to the orthodox it was more like an open wound disrupting the flow of commodities and traffic. In any case, highway robbery was at once a fact of social life and a major cultural obsession of eighteenth-century England. Most of the canonical eighteenth-century novels include either highwaymen themselves or gentlemen in highway robber's costume. The line separating these pretended and fictional highwaymen from the subjects of criminal biography, a form that can be traced back to Elizabethan times but that itself becomes canonized in the early eighteenth century, is not always easy to draw.6 Recent writing on the highwayman legends and their fictional 3 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), pp. 178-79; Keith Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London: Routledge, 1978), pp. 88-95; and David Trotter, Circulation: Defoe, Dickens, and the Economics ofthe Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), esp. pp. 61-62. 4 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. CB. Macpherson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), pp. 300, 374. 5 Defoe's Review, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), 14:167. Quoted in Trotter, p. 4. 6 Notonly are the criminal biographies full oftall tales and inventions, but the biographical collections which preceded the Newgate Calendar contain such things as the life of Colonel Jack "as written by himself—a summary of Defoe's novel (Johnson, p. 117...