demographic realities and warfare ensured that there were many widows with
families to support), or wives who had been deserted by their husbands, a situ-
ation that was all too common among the very poor, were likely to feel soonest
the threat of starvation from loss of work or a sudden increase in prices.^206 A ‘very
high proportion of London women’, Peter Earle has concluded, ‘were wholly or
partly dependent on their own earnings for their living’.^207 And for many it was
a precarious living indeed. Two pamphlet-sellers described to the under-secre-
tary of state (who was intent on putting them into the house of correction for
hawking seditious material on the streets) how they went frequently to printers’
shops to see what new material was available and sold whatever they could get.
They did so, ‘purely for want of bread’, as one said; ‘to get a little money to sup-
port herself’, the other added.^208 Very large numbers of women patched
together a meagre living from casual or seasonal work, and from a variety or a
succession of jobs. Many of the women whose lives were briefly examined by the
ordinary of Newgate before they were executed at Tyburn revealed what must
have been the all too typical pattern of scratching for a living that must have
faced women in London, particularly women on their own. Alice Gray, aged 32 ,
said that she
had all along worked very hard for her livelihood... as both a wife and a widow... and
had since her husband’s death (as in his lifetime) maintained herself by her honest and
constant Labour; she making up Cloaths for Soldiers, and sometimes going to Washing
and Scowring, and at other times Watching with Sick Folks, and being a Nurse to
them.^209
Mary Day, executed for burglary, aged 33 , had ‘worked hard for her own and
her Children’s Livelihood; and that of late, her Employment was to buy and sell
old broken Glass-Bottles, etc.’^210 Elizabeth Price, 37 , ‘had follow’d sometimes
the Business of picking up Rags and Cinders, and at other times of selling Fruit
and Oysters, crying Hot-Pudding and Gray-Peas in the Streets, and the like’.^211
There were many others like them, making a case of a sort for themselves, no
doubt, to balance what was for many a list of earlier convictions, but describing
a pattern of occasional work and of deprivation and difficulty that rings all too
true, and that some claimed led to their offences.^212
At the best of times, London provided an uncertain livelihood for large num-
bers of the working population, men as well as women. The pattern of pros-
ecutions for crimes against property seems to me to reflect, though perhaps
only indirectly, changes in the ability of women to support themselves. The70 Introduction: The Crime Problem(^206) Rogers, ‘Policing the Poor’, 127 – 47. (^207) Earle, ‘Female Labour Market’, 337.
(^208) SP 35 / 8 / 14 ( 1 – 4 ). (^209) Ordinary’s Account, 2 May 1717.
(^210) Ordinary’s Account, 16 September 1709. (^211) Ordinary’s Account, 31 October 1712.
(^212) Deborah Hardcastle, 24 , condemned for burglary, told the ordinary that her husband, a seaman,
had died recently, leaving her in ‘great Poverty and Want’ and with her elderly mother and two small
children to look after (Ordinary’s Account, 31 January 1713 ). For women’s poverty and theft in eighteenth-
century London, see Linebaugh, The London Hanged, 143 – 9, 338– 41.
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