The ordinary sold his account of the condemned to an audience that almost
certainly made as natural a connection as he did between crime and immoral-
ity. The author of Hanging, Not Punishment Enoughreflected the views of more than
just the active supporters of the societies for the reformation of manners when,
speaking of violent crime, he argued that ‘a General Reformation... is most
likely to put a stop to this spreading evil, since thatwould set Men right in their
Principles, to the corruption of which their ill practices are without doubt
owing’.^176 In his reports on crime in the capital to Richard Coffin, Richard
Lapthorne made a similar connection between crime and immoral behaviour.
He saw in the violence around him ominous manifestations of the dangers that
threatened a Protestant nation. ‘The world with us is very unruly debauched
and profane’, he wrote in 1690 , ‘aboundance of Robberies comitted and vice
very litle checked by those in Authority which makes mee feare God is yet pro-
viding greater scourges for the Nation which God grant our humilliation and
sincere repentance may divert.’^177
The Accountsof the ordinaries of Newgate carried this message of crime as
moral failure into the mid-eighteenth century and beyond.^178 It was also de-
veloped in graphic form and in an even wider variety of admonitory literature
than ever before—particularly in work aimed at servants and apprentices and
their masters, a sign perhaps of a growing concern in the second quarter of the
century about the weakening of the institution of apprenticeship and the dimin-
ishing of control in general over the conduct of the young. The argument that the
erosion of moral sense would lead to greater and greater sins and offences was
encapsulated in dramatic form, for example, in George Lillo’s The London
Merchant, or, the History of George Barnwell( 1731 ). The play had a great success in the
metropolis, perhaps because it was one of the first to place the world of the com-
mercial middle class of London at the centre of the drama. But it was also suc-
cessful because of the powerful moral message it offered in retelling a story
familiar from a seventeenth-century ballad of the sad fate of a naïve apprentice
who was seduced by ‘a lady of pleasure’, and persuaded to steal from his em-
ployer, a merchant, and then to murder his uncle. He fell to his ruin in the way
the audience was well-schooled to expect: ‘step by step... from crime to crime,
to this last horrid act’ of murder (iv.xvi). Both Barnwell, the apprentice, and Mill-
wood, the courtesan, were convicted and executed: she far from contrite; he sub-
missive and repentant, content that ‘justice, in compassion to mankind, cuts off
a wretch like me, by one such example to secure thousands from future ruin’
(v.v). The play was such a huge success with the London public, certainly the em-
ployers among them, that it was frequently revived during holidays and com-
monly on the lord mayor’s day as a suitable entertainment for apprentices.^179Introduction: The Crime Problem 61(^176) Hanging, Not Punishment Enough, 22. (^177) Kerr and Coffin (eds.), Portledge Papers, 90.
(^178) For the Accountin the 1740 s and its decline thereafter, see McKenzie, ‘Lives of the Most Notorious
Criminals’, ch. 4.
(^179) George Lillo, The London Merchant, ed. William H. McBurney (Lincoln, Neb., 1965 ), xii–xiii.
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