Crime and the State 375in such matters in several of his social pamphlets in the late 1720 s,^20 as well as
John Gay’s use of highwaymen and thief-takers as vehicles of political satire in
his immensely successful music-drama The Beggar’s Operain 1728. The anxiety
created by the fear of gangs and reports of violence gave rise to other attempts
to grasp the nature of the crime problem and to think about ways in which it
might be tackled. There had been nothing earlier to match Mandeville’s
Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn( 1725 ), apart from the
pamphlet inspired by the post-war crime wave at the end of the seventeenth
century, Hanging Not Punishment Enough.^21 No doubt much of the attraction of
crime writing remained its entertainment value—and that could be served by
heavily fictionalized stories of danger and adventure on the highways from an
earlier time or accounts of prostitutes stealing from their clients. But the volume
of material being published by the third decade of the eighteenth century also
suggests that at least part of the audience was interested in authentic accounts of
more recent offences and offenders, accounts that underlined the seriousness of
crime as a social problem.
The concern with which the City authorities and, increasingly after 1714 , the
central government regarded crime in the capital can be seen in the variety of
efforts they both made to combat it. The government in particular made several
important interventions. On the one hand, the administration’s willingness to
put resources into the criminal justice system led to renewed efforts to find a sat-
isfactory substitute for the branding that followed benefit of clergy and a pun-
ishment that could be imposed on men and women pardoned from hanging. As
a consequence, although capital punishment was by no means displaced, there
was to be a fundamental change in the way property offences were dealt with in
London after 1714 , when transportation to America was established as a pun-
ishment available to the courts in felony cases.
The central government also committed resources to deter crime by encour-
aging the arrest, prosecution, and conviction of dangerous offenders. In so doing
they fostered developments in policing in the second quarter of the eighteenth
century. They also set in train fundamental changes in the nature of the criminal
trial in that same period. As we have seen, one of the characteristics of trials
for felonies in England had been that they were conducted essentially as direct
confrontations between a private prosecutor and the accused. That
remained true in the majority of cases well into the nineteenth century. But a
(^20) A Brief Historical Account of the Lives of the Six Notorious Street Robbers, Executed at Kingston( 1726 ), Parochial
Tyranny( 1727 ), Augusta Triumphans( 1728 ), Street-Robberies Consider’d: The Reason of Their Being so Frequent
( 1728 ), Second Thoughts are Best: Or, a Further Improvement of a Late Scheme to Prevent Street Robberies( 1729 ), An
Effectual Scheme for the Immediate Preventing of Street Robberies( 1731 ). For Defoe’s writings on crime, see Lincoln
B. Faller, Crime and Defoe. A New Kind of Writing(Cambridge, 1993 ); Ian A. Bell, Literature and Crime in
Augustan England( 1991 ); Philip Rawlings, ‘Defoe and Street Robberies: An Undiscovered Text’, Notes and
Queries(February 1983 ), 23 – 6.
(^21) Bernard Mandeville, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn( 1725 ), The Augustan
Reprint Society, introduction by Malvin R. Zirker (Los Angeles, 1964 ).