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2010 Reading #14: Con Men and Cutpurses
Feb. 13th, 2010 05:02 pmBooks 1-10.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
13. The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock.
14. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore. A couple of years ago I read Moore's Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (which, if I recall correctly, was recommended to me by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
stephanieburgis) and thought it was good enough to look for more of her books; The Thieves' Opera was also good. This book is not precisely written by Moore; it's an anthology of materials on (mainly) 18th Century British criminals, first appearing in various contemporary publications, particularly The Newgate Calendar: The Malefactors' Bloody Register. Here are Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild (covered more extensively in The Thieves' Opera), Dick Turpin, William Kidd, Edward Teach (AKA Blackbeard), Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and others less famous. At times this reads like a litany of class inequities, homophobia, and other unsurprising characteristics of Britain in the 1700s; but there are some great stories here, my personal favorite being that of Mary Carleton, who posed as a German princess to defraud many a man hopeful of taking control of her fortune. Seriously, that one ought to be made into a movie.
11. The Dream Years by Lisa Goldstein.
12. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow.
13. The Bone Forest by Robert Holdstock.
14. Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld by Lucy Moore. A couple of years ago I read Moore's Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (which, if I recall correctly, was recommended to me by
stephanieburgis) and thought it was good enough to look for more of her books; The Thieves' Opera was also good. This book is not precisely written by Moore; it's an anthology of materials on (mainly) 18th Century British criminals, first appearing in various contemporary publications, particularly The Newgate Calendar: The Malefactors' Bloody Register. Here are Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild (covered more extensively in The Thieves' Opera), Dick Turpin, William Kidd, Edward Teach (AKA Blackbeard), Anne Bonny, Mary Read, and others less famous. At times this reads like a litany of class inequities, homophobia, and other unsurprising characteristics of Britain in the 1700s; but there are some great stories here, my personal favorite being that of Mary Carleton, who posed as a German princess to defraud many a man hopeful of taking control of her fortune. Seriously, that one ought to be made into a movie.