Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale

Journal | Annali di Ca’ Foscari. Serie occidentale
Journal issue | 50 | 2016
Research Article | “Quite another Vein of Wickedness”

“Quite another Vein of Wickedness”

Making Sense of Highway Robbery in Defoe’s Colonel Jack

Abstract

In early 1720s London highway or street robbery, especially by ‘gangs’, was highly topical; for some decades it had been a cause of much anxiety, and had recently been the target of increasingly harsh legislation. Yet the vast literature that “accompanied and stimulated” that legislation has been described by Robert Shoemaker as deeply ambivalent, swinging between negative images of ruthless brutes and positive images of polite gentlemen highwaymen. In Daniel Defoe’s Colonel Jack (1722) the protagonist’s thieving career follows a rising curve of violence, ‘progressing’ from picking merchants’ pockets and compounding to mugging old gentlemen and ambushing apprentices. Jack and his tutor/companion Will then fall into “quite another Vein of Wickedness” by getting in with a gang of footpads and burglars, a promotion Will promises, will make them “all Gentlemen together”. This essay suggests that we read the robbery episodes in this novel as an attempt to “make sense of” such violent crime and its conflicting cultural representations, especially as they relate to the gentlemanly aspirations which are a dominant motif in this novel.  


Open access | Peer reviewed

Submitted: May 7, 2016 | Accepted: July 19, 2016 | Published Sept. 30, 2016 | Language: en

Keywords Eighteenth century • Crime • London • Defoe

Copyright © 2016 Jeanne Clegg. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

Permalink http://doi.org/10.14277/2499-1562/AnnOc-50-16-11


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