A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Johnson (Everyman edition, Vol. 2, p. 447) that when, in the 1780s, there was talk of doing away
with Tyburn, where executions were turned into public holidays and children were often hanged for
stealing, Johnson said indignantly that ‘executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not
draw spectators, they don’t answer their purpose...’ Writing about this period, an English historian
of crime and punishment says:
Children were starved by drunken parents and parish nurses, they were
sent out to pick pockets, they were forced to become prostitutes and
many not more than twelve years old were ‘half eaten up with the foul
distemper’ of venereal disease, they were made to beg and sometimes
scarred or crippled so they might be more successful in exciting pity.
They seldom did excite it. Pity was still a strange and valuable
emotion. Unwanted babies were left in the streets to die or were
thrown into dung heaps or open drains; the torture of animals was a
popular sport. Cat-dropping, bear-baiting and bull-baiting were...
universally enjoyed.
Christopher Hibbert: The Roots of Evil, p. 44.
And it was not only animals who were at risk. England had no love of foreigners, and they were
likely to be jeered at and pelted with mud as they walked through the streets of London. One
Portuguese visitor who got into a fight with an English sailor had his ear nailed to the wall, and
when he broke away he was battered and stabbed by the mob until he died. Offenders who were
sentenced to be exposed in the stocks were often stoned to death. But such brutality was not
confined to the lower classes.
The Mohocks, a society whose members were dedicated to the
ambition of ‘doing all possible hurt to their fellow creatures’ were
mostly gentlemen. They employed their ample leisure in forcing
prostitutes and old women to stand on their heads in tar barrels so that
they could prick their legs with their swords; or in making them jump
up and down to avoid the swinging blades; in disfiguring their victims
by boring out their eyes or flattening their noses; in waylaying servants
and, as in the case of Lady Winchelsea’s maid, beating them and
slashing their faces. To work themselves up to the necessary pitch of
enthusiasm for their ferocious games, they first drank so much that
they were quite ‘beyond the possibility of attending to any notions of
reason or humanity’. Some of the Mohocks also seem to have been
members of the Bold Bucks who, apparently, had formally to deny the
existence of God and eat every Sunday a dish known as Holy Ghost
Pie. The ravages of the Bold Bucks were more specifically sexual than
those of the Mohocks and consequently, as it was practically
impossible to obtain a conviction for rape and as the age of consent
was twelve, they were more openly conducted.
The Roots of Evil, p. 45
In the anonymous Victorian autobiography My Secret Life, the writer describes how he picked up a
middle-aged bawd and a ten-year-old-girl at Vauxhall Gardens and possessed the girl several times.
‘Oh, he ain’t going to do it like that other man - you said no one should again.’ ‘Be quiet you little
fool, it won’t hurt you. Open your legs.’ And the writer admits cheerfully (Vol. 2, chapter 9): ‘I