The Steal (4 page)

Moll snatches the bundle. A professional shoplifter trains her to steal a plate, brocaded silk, ribbons, and other expensive items. She catches on. Three days later:

Moll’s confession to the court is either ironic or sincere, depending on how seriously you take the book as a cautionary tale. Instead of being hanged, she is transported to America, to riches, respectability, and romantic happiness. Defoe tells his heroine’s biography in comic as well as moral language: “I grew as impudent a thief and as dexterous as ever Moll Cutpurse was,” she brags.

It is no accident that Defoe, the first modern writer to make a living from his craft, chose a shoplifter as his heroine. Nor that he picked Moll Flanders, a character born from mingling fiction with interviews and newspaper articles who inspired a debate about her real identity. Then, as now, no one knows exactly what happens when a shoplifter steals or why she is doing it. Like espionage or a love affair, the details have to be imagined or conjured.

If the first female shoplifters stole to get ahead, the first so-called thief catchers—organizers of shoplifting gangs who doubled as snitches—walked the thin line between consuming and stealing. These thief catchers were always men. Of all of them, Jonathan Wild—who also “helped” victims recover the objects shoplifters had stolen for a fee—is the most fascinating. Wild was a precursor of Charles Dickens’s Fagin, the sinister abuser of shoplifting kids. But in the eighteenth century, Wild’s mash-up of buying and stealing and shoplifting and catching shoplifters made him celebrated and defamed.

The man who organized and caught shoplifters was brought down by the crime. In 1725, Wild was tried for shoplifting fifty yards of lace from the shop of Catherine Streham. The judge acquitted him, since it could not be proved that he was on the scene, although he most likely set up the crime. The transcript from his trial reveals how Wild’s thieves planned to shoplift or “speak with”—another euphemism—lace from Streham’s shop by impersonating demanding customers.

After Wild was hanged, a shoplifting craze hit London, inspiring some merchants to appeal to King George I to establish a large reward for catching shoplifters. This resulted in a wave of executions and in the institutionalizing of the thief catcher, the half shoplifter–half snitch role Wild introduced. But neither of these measures halted the shoplifting spike, which some observers attributed to an underworld protest over Wild’s death and others believed was a delayed reaction to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, a financial catastrophe to rival the great Wall Street crash of 2008. In the rise of small thefts, some saw a revolt against big larceny among the nobility.

Wild became a hero, first commemorated in another semifactual account, possibly also by Daniel Defoe,
The True and Accurate Account of the Life of Jonathan Wild
. Wild then appeared as Peachum in John Gay’s satiric play
The Beggar’s Opera
, which unfavorably compared merchants, police, and politicians to shoplifters, prostitutes, and fences. Gay’s point of view was that everyone was corrupt: The shoplifter was at one with the world. In a conversation among several shoplifting prostitutes, one boasts about the technique of holding the shopkeeper’s gaze while she snatches trinkets and another complains about competition.

In
The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild
, Henry Fielding, the satirist, lawyer, and crime-fighting pioneer, writes that one synonym for the crime is “buttock and file,” slang for a prostitute. Another is “sneaking budge.” But although Fielding founded the first private police force, his explanations for the crime were less those of a crime stopper than a social critic. His manifesto,
An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers,
blamed shoplifting on “the increase in luxury among the lower orders of the people” and on consumers’ greed: “Indeed, could not the Thief find a Market for his Goods, there would be an absolute End of . . . Shoplifting.” Still, in his novel
Tom Jones
, exploring
theatrum mundi
—the idea that the world is a stage—Fielding proposed an even more radical cause of theft. On the stage of London, where what you wore determined status, shoplifting might provide the costumes and props necessary to escape the role you were destined to play.

 

 

A handkerchief-shoplifting drama captured international interest by pitting a foreigner against the country he was protecting. In 1756, Christopher William Schroeder, a Hanoverian soldier stationed in England, allegedly shoplifted two silk handkerchiefs from a store in Maidstone, a town about thirty miles from London. (The Hanoverian forces were defending England from France.) Harris, the merchant whose handkerchiefs Schroeder allegedly stole, reported the crime. The press seized on the incident, which became known as the Maidstone Affair, as proof of British corruption and foreign decadence. One question was whether Schroeder should be punished according to local laws, which might hang him, or more benevolent military ones, as his general recommended. After he threatened to withdraw his troops, the general prevailed. That Schroeder was, according to some sources, sentenced to run three times through a gauntlet of three hundred men, each of whom whipped him, did not pacify British nationalists. Nor that the Hanoverian troops withdrew ahead of schedule. The handkerchief shoplifting stood for England’s shameful dependence on a foreign power and for the luxury-loving soldiers protecting the nation that invented the Bloody Code.

In 1778, the satirist John Collett painted a marvelous scene,
Shop-Lifter Detected
. The shoplifter stands in the foreground, dressed in a fashionable yellow-and-pink gown and a white stomacher. She gathers her skirts around her legs, while a boy kneels on the floor in front of her and pulls a lace ribbon from beneath her petticoats, where she had stashed it. He is looking up her skirt. A scandalized older female customer watches. A few rolls of lace and ribbon lie on the floor near the shoplifter’s feet. Another man—perhaps the shopkeeper—stands behind her, grasping her upper arms. He appears to be pulling fabric out of her décolletage. The shoplifter is turning her head to look at him, and in a moment, he might embrace her. Through the open door, a peace officer (a precursor of a policeman) bursts, intending to take the shoplifter to Newgate. A small dog is barking. In the corner of the room, on a shelf near the ceiling, sits a statue of Hermes, or Mercury, the god of thieves.

Collett painted
Shop-Lifter Detected
as British soldiers were returning home and taking back the menial jobs women had held during wartime, thus creating a new generation of female shoplifters. The most famous, Elizabeth Barnsley, a real-life Moll Flanders, played the part of an upwardly mobile Londoner. When a Bond Street merchant confronted the twenty-nine-year-old Barnsley and her partner Ann Wheeler as they tried to shoplift eighteen yards of muslin and some Irish cloth, the women denied it. Friends of Lady Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire, frequent shoppers, and servant owners would never “tumble” cloth, as shoplifting was then called. Those excuses did not prevent the thieves from being arrested, although in court, the bailiff referred to them (perhaps ironically) as “ladies.” Barnsley was sentenced to transportation. On the voyage to Botany Bay, she demanded to wear her own clothes, as opposed to the dull uniform of the guilty. But she underwent a conversion onboard. Even before she had arrived in the penal colony, she graduated to midwifery.

The American Revolution inspired all manner of rebellion, including theft. English literature at the end of the eighteenth century abounds with Robin Hoods of both genders. William Godwin’s novel
Caleb Williams
,
or Things as They Are
, gives the leader of the thieves, Captain Raymond, these lines: “We, who are thieves without a licence, are at open war with another set of men who are thieves according to law.”

But in England a long half century passed between the end of the American Revolution and the end of hanging shoplifters. Attempts to stop began in 1771, when Mary Jones, an indigent woman whose husband had been impressed by the navy, was hanged for shoplifting a piece of linen to clothe her baby. The Whig orator and politician Sir William Meredith protested, “I do not believe a fouler murder was ever committed against the law, than of this woman by law.” In his famous speech, “On Frequent Executions,” Meredith pleaded that not only was Jones “young” and “most remarkably handsome”—as if her looks should have prevented her from shoplifting—she was penniless and in debt because her husband had gone off to fight for his country. But even using the word “stolen” to describe the young soldier’s impressment failed to convince the House of Commons that hanging a shoplifter was wrong.

In France, a great thinker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was remaking petty theft from a sin into a political act committed by citizens to even the score against the aristocracy and the monarchy. Published in 1787, two years before French peasants stormed the Bastille, Rousseau’s
Confessions
admits to masturbation,
ménage à trois
, masochism, child abandonment, and petty theft. The volume recounts how, years earlier, while apprenticed to an engraver in Geneva, to help a friend make some money on the side, Rousseau steals asparagus from his master’s garden. He steals apples from the cellar. He steals his master’s “talent” by using his tools secretly. Then Rousseau gets caught, and the penalty for stealing and the pleasure of doing it become intertwined. “I was convinced that to rob and be punished were inseparable,” he writes. “A kind of traffic, in which, if I perform my part of the bargain my master would not be deficient in performing his.”

Two years later, at age sixteen, Rousseau graduates to women’s trinkets. He has worked as an apprentice in the household of the comtesse de Vercellis for only a few months before her death. From the comtesse’s possessions, he steals a pink-and-silver ribbon. When the theft is discovered, Rousseau lies: Marion, a pretty, young cook whom he believed was infatuated with him, gave it to him. In the
Confessions
, he describes how, as the rest of the household staff looks on, he professes his innocence and lays blame on an innocent woman. “I accuse her boldly: she remains confused and speechless, casting a look on me that would have disarmed a demon.” Marion apparently ventured her own accusation: “Ah, Rousseau! I believed you were a good fellow! You are making me very unhappy and yet I wouldn’t want to be in your place.” Both servants were let go.

Though apparently shameless enough in the moment of being accused of the theft, Rousseau was sufficiently responsible to social norms to feel guilty about Marion’s fate. He never revealed the details of the incident until writing the
Confessions
. It may have been one of the reasons—the only reason—for his writing them. Yet the childhood thefts and Rousseau’s attitude toward stealing also provided the root for some of the most intriguing material in his philosophical treatises, specifically his ideas about forging a new self separate from the one determined by social injustices.

Rousseau ultimately insists that society—not sin—makes us steal. He did not consider thieving to be part of his authentic self. For example, he wondered whether, if he had been questioned in private—as opposed to being publicly shamed—he would have confessed instead of blaming Marion. “Thus I learned to covet, dissemble, lie, and, at length, to steal, a propensity I never felt the least idea of before, though since that time I have never been able entirely to divest myself of it. Desire and inability united naturally led to this vice, which is the reason pilfering is so common among footmen and apprentices.”

Echoing Saint Augustine, Rousseau confesses that he stole out of “complaisance,” as well, observing “it was not so terrible to thieve as I had imagined” and writing, “I applied myself to thieving with great tranquility.”

After the French Revolution, a revolutionary tribunal apparently decided that pregnant women could shoplift with impunity. The Marquis de Sade endorsed theft as a prescription for freedom. In the pamphlet he inserted in his 1795 erotic novel,
Philosophy in the Bedroom
, “Frenchmen! One More Effort If You Wish to Be Republicans!” he writes:

Two hundred years later, the French philosopher Michel Foucault describes how the last years of the eighteenth century realized a key “shift from a criminality of blood to a criminality of fraud.” Driven by the birth of capitalism, a renewed hunger for material goods, and an escalation in the number of people able to afford such goods, the shift incited theft, a surge in police activities, as well as penalties for the crime—15 percent of people who stole food were executed in the 1790s, as opposed to 5 percent before the Revolution. Ultimately, bourgeois society—not political upheaval, Foucault writes—redoubles theft and its punishment.