Crime and the State 373The printed literature of crime expanded to such an extent that, while it is
almost certainly true that it made its way in the market by striving to entertain as
much as to instruct, it is also likely to have found an audience after 1714 because
of the interest and concern generated by the sense that crime was at dangerous
levels and threatened the lives and property oflarge numbers of people. It was
an audience that seems to have been made up not of the very poorest in society,
but very largely of people of the middling ranks in London—those who were
most likely to have been victims of property crime, or at least to have been
prominent among prosecutors.^13 The Grub Street producers of so much of this
criminal literature inevitably emphasized its dramatic and prurient sides in
their search for profits. One can see this in the compilations of lives and trials
that were so notable a development in the printed crime literature in this
period—a development that took advantage of the amount of material being
published in the Sessions Papers and the Ordinaries’ Accountsin response to
what appears to have been an insatiable appetite for accounts of crimes, the lives
of condemned offenders, trials, and executions at Tyburn. Hardly surprisingly,
in a period in which violent crime was at the forefront of concern, the first such
collection, produced by a man calling himself Captain Alexander Smith, was
A Compleat History of the Lives and Robberies of the Most Notorious Highway-Men, which
expanded to three volumes and went through five editions between 1713 and
1719. It was followed by similar compilations by Captain Charles Johnson.^14
These collections both drew on an older tradition of rogue literature and were
heavily fictionalized. But subsequent compilations of criminal lives and of trials
were based more directly on the Sessions Papers and Ordinaries’ Accountsand
introduced more authentic reports of offenders and trials.^15 Information about
crime and criminals became a staple of some of the London newspapers that be-
came so common by the 1720 s. They too fed the appetite for crime news in the
capital.
The publisher of the Sessions Papers also responded to the concern about
crime by making the accounts of the Old Bailey trials much longer and more ac-
cessible and interesting to the public. The December 1729 issue of the Sessions
Papers was very different indeed from its predecessors. It was reduced slightly in
size, but increased from eight to twenty-four pages, printed on better paper, with
larger type and a much more generous layout that made it easier to read and
more attractive to collect. In making these changes, the publisher may have
(^13) On the audience for the printed literature of crime, see McKenzie, ‘Lives of the Most Notorious
Criminals’, 7 – 13.
(^14) A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates.. .( 1724 ) and A General History of
the Lives and Adventures of the Most Famous Highwaymen, Murderers, Street Robbers, etc... .( 1734 , 2 nd edn. 1742 ).
(^15) B.N. A Compleat Collection of Remarkable Tryals of the most Notorious Malefactors, at the Sessions-House in the
Old Baily, for near Fifty Years past... ( 4 vols., 1718 – 20 ); The Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals who have been
condemn’d and Executed... From the Year 1720 to the Present Time... ( 3 vols., 1735 ). Further collections of ‘lives’
were published in 1742 and later; and of trials in 1734 – 5 , 1742 , and later. See McKenzie, ‘Lives of the
Most Notorious Criminals’, Pts I and II.