In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, widespread fear of criminal assault motivated the publication of hundreds of pamphlets tracing the lives and misdeeds of London's most notorious rogues. Turned to Account is a study that focuses on the popular genre of criminal biography, examining how it played upon and reflected English society's fears and interest in aberrant behaviour. The author has not produced a criminal history, but an intriguing distillation of some 2,000 separate narratives describing the lives, deeds, and dying words of thieves, murderers, and various scoundrels. Lincoln...

This book seeks to recover something of the original excitement, challenge and significance of Defoe's four novels of criminal life by reading them within and against the conventions of early eighteenth-century criminal biography. Crime raised deeply troubling questions in Defoe's time, not least as a powerful sign of the breakdown of traditional social authority and order. Arguing that Defoe's novels, like criminal biography, provided ways of facing and working through, as well as avoiding, certain of the moral and intellectual difficulties that crime raised for him and his readers, Faller...

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, widespread fear of criminal assault motivated the publication of hundreds of pamphlets tracing the lives and misdeeds of London's most notorious rogues. Turned to Account is a study that focuses on the popular genre of criminal biography, examining how it played upon and reflected English society's fears and interest in aberrant behaviour. The author has not produced a criminal history, but an intriguing distillation of some 2,000 separate narratives describing the lives, deeds, and dying words of thieves, murderers, and various scoundrels. Lincoln...