JUVENILE THIEVES.
_The Beginning of the Downhill Journey_.—_Candidates for Newgate
Honours_.—_Black Spots of London_.—_Life from the Young Robber’s Point of
View_.—_The Seedling Recruits the most difficult to reform_.—_A doleful
Summing-up_.—_A Phase of the Criminal Question left unnoticed_.—_Budding
Burglars_.—_Streams which keep at full flood the Black Sea of
Crime_.—_The Promoters of_ “_Gallows Literature_.”—_Another Shot at a
Fortress of the Devil_.—“_Poison-Literature_.”—“_Starlight
Sall_.”—“_Panther Bill_.”
IT is quite true that, counting prostitutes and receivers of stolen
goods, there are twenty thousand individuals eating the daily bread of
dishonesty within the city of London alone; there are many more than
these. And the worst part of the business is, that those that are
omitted from the batch form the most painful and repulsive feature of the
complete picture. Shocking enough is it to contemplate the white-haired,
tottering criminal holding on to the front of the dock because he dare
not trust entirely his quaking legs, and with no more to urge in his
defence than Fagin had when it came to the last—“an old man, my lord, a
very old man;” and we give him our pity ungrudgingly because we are no
longer troubled with fears for his hostility as regards the present or
the future. It is all over with him or very nearly. The grave yawns for
him and we cannot help feeling that after all he has hurt himself much
more than he has hurt us, and when we reflect on the awful account he
will presently be called on to answer, our animosity shrinks aside, and
we would recommend him to mercy if it were possible. No, it is not those
who have run the length of their tether of crime that we have to fear,
but those who by reason of their tender age are as yet but feeble
toddlers on the road that leads to the hulks. It would be instructive as
well as of great service if reliable information could be obtained as to
the beginning of the down-hill journey by our juvenile criminals.
Without doubt it would be found that in a lamentably large number of
cases the beginning did not rest in the present possessors at all, but
that they were bred and nurtured in it, inheriting it from their parents
as certain forms of physical disease are inherited.
In very few instances are they _trained_ to thieving by a father who
possibly has gone through all the various phases of criminal punishment,
from the simple local oakum shed and treadmill to the far-away stone
quarry and mineral mine, and so knows all about it. The said human wolf
and enemy of all law and social harmony, his progenitor, does not take
his firstborn on his knee as soon as he exhibits symptoms of knowing
right from wrong, and do his best to instil into his young mind what as a
candidate for Newgate honours the first principles of his life should be.
This would be bad enough, but what really happens is worse. To train
one’s own child to paths of rectitude it is necessary to make him aware
of the existence of paths of iniquity and wrong, that when inadvertently
he approaches the latter, he may recognise and shun them. So on the
other hand, if by the devil’s agency a child is to be made bold and
confident in the wrong road, the right must be exhibited to him in a
light so ridiculous as to make it altogether distasteful to him. Still a
comparison is instituted, and matters may so come about that one day he
may be brought to re-consider the judiciousness of his choice and perhaps
to reverse his previous decision. But if he has received no teaching at
all; if in the benighted den in which he is born, and in which his
childish intellect dawns, no ray of right and truth ever penetrates, and
he grows into the use of his limbs and as much brains as his brutish
breeding affords him, and with no other occupation before him than to
follow in the footsteps of his father the thief—how much more hopeless is
his case?
Does the reader ask, are there such cases? I can answer him in sorrowful
confidence, that in London alone they may be reckoned in thousands. In
parts of Spitalfields, in Flower and Dean Street, and in Kent Street, and
many other streets that might be enumerated, they are the terror of small
shopkeepers, and in Cow Cross, with its horrible chinks in the wall that
do duty for the entrance of courts and alleys—Bit Alley, Frying Pan
Alley, Turk’s Head-court, and Broad Yard, they swarm like mites in rotten
cheese. As a rule, the police seldom make the acquaintance of this
thievish small fry (if they did, the estimated number of London robbers
would be considerably augmented); but occasionally, just as a sprat will
make its appearance along with a haul of mackerel, one reads in the
police reports of “Timothy Mullins, a very small boy, whose head scarcely
reached the bar of the dock;” or of “John Smith, a child of such tender
age that the worthy magistrate appeared greatly shocked,” charged with
some one of the hundred acts of petty pilfering by means of which the
poor little wretches contrive to stave off the pangs of hunger. Where is
the use of reasoning with Master Mullins on his evil propensities? The
one propensity of his existence is that of the dog—to provide against
certain gnawing pains in his belly. If he has another propensity, it is
to run away out of dread for consequences, which is dog-like too. All
the argument you can array against this little human waif with one idea,
will fail to convince him of his guilt; he has his private and
deeply-rooted opinion on the matter, you may depend, and if he screws his
fists into his eyes, and does his earnest best to make them water—if when
in the magisterial presence he contorts his countenance in affected
agony, it is merely because he perceives from his worship’s tone that he
wishes to agonize him, and is shrewd enough to know that to “give in
best,” as he would express it, is the way to get let off easy.
But supposing that he were not overawed by the magisterial presence, and
felt free to speak what is foremost in his mind unreservedly as he would
speak it to one of his own set. Then he would say, “It is all very fine
for you to sit there, you that have not only had a jolly good breakfast,
but can afford to sport a silver toothpick to pick your teeth with
afterwards, it is all very fine for you to preach to me that I never
shall do any good, but one of these days come to something that’s
precious bad, if I don’t cut the ways of thieving, and take to honest
ways. There’s so many different kinds of honest ways. _Yours_ is a good
’un. I ain’t such a fool as not to know that it’s better to walk in
honest ways like them _you’ve_ got into, and to wear gold chains and
velvet waistcoats, than to prowl about in ragged corduroys, and dodge the
pleeseman, and be a prig: but how am I to get into them sorts of honest
ways? Will you give me a hist up to ’em? Will you give me a leg-up—I’m
such a little cove, you see—on to the bottom round of the ladder that
leads up to ’em? If it ain’t in your line to do so, p’raps you could
recommend me to a lady or gentleman that would? No! Then, however am
_I_ to get into honest ways? Shall I make a start for ’em soon as I
leaves this ere p’lice office, from which you are so werry kind as to
discharge me? Shall I let the chances of stealing a turnip off a stall,
or a loaf out of a baker’s barrow, go past me, while I keep straight on,
looking out for a honest way?—straight on, and straight on, till I gets
the hungry staggers (_you_ never had the hungry staggers, Mr.
Magistrate), and tumble down on the road? I am not such a fool, thank’e.
I don’t see the pull of it. I can do better in dishonest ways. I’m much
obliged to YOU. I’m sure of a crust, though a hard ’un, while I stick to
the latter, and if I break down, you’ll take care of me for a spell, and
fatten me up a bit; but s’pose I go on the hunt after them honest ways
you was just now preaching about, and I miss ’em, what am I then? A
casual pauper, half starved on a pint of skilly, or ‘a shocking case of
destitution,’ and the leading character in a coroner’s inquest!” All
this Master Timothy Mullins might urge, and beyond favouring him with an
extra month for contempt of court, what could the magistrate do or say?
Swelling the ranks of juvenile thieves we find in large numbers the
thief-born. Writing on this subject, a reverend gentleman of wisdom and
experience says, “Some are thieves from infancy. Their parents are
thieves in most cases; in others, the children are orphans, or have been
forsaken by their parents, and in such cases the children generally fall
into the hands of the professional thief-trainer. In every low criminal
neighbourhood there are numbers of children who never knew their parents,
and who are fed and clothed by the old thieves, and made to earn their
wages by dishonest practices. When the parent thieves are imprisoned or
transported, their children are left to shift for themselves, and so fall
into the hands of the thief-trainer. Here, then, is one great source of
crime. These children are nurtured in it. They come under no good moral
influence; and until the ragged-schools were started, they had no idea of
honesty, not to mention morality and religion. Sharpened by hunger,
intimidated by severe treatment, and rendered adroit by vigilant
training, this class of thieves is perhaps the most numerous, the most
daring, the cleverest, and the most difficult to reform. In a moral
point of view, these savages are much worse off than the savages of the
wilderness, inasmuch as all the advantages of civilization are made to
serve their criminal habits. The poor, helpless little children
literally grow up into a criminal career, and have no means of knowing
that they are wrong; they cannot help themselves, and have strong claims
on the compassion of every lover of his species.”
Truly enough these seedling recruits of the criminal population are the
most difficult to reform. They are impregnable alike to persuasion and
threatening. They have an ingrain conviction that it is _you_ who are
wrong, not them. That you are wrong in the first place in appropriating
all the good things the world affords, leaving none for them but what
they steal; and in the next place, they regard all your endeavours to
persuade them to abandon the wretched life of a thief for the equally
poor though more creditable existence of the honest lad, as humbug and
selfishness. “No good feeling is ever allowed to predominate; all their
passions are distorted, all their faculties are perverted. They believe
the clergy are all hypocrites, the judges and magistrates tyrants, and
honest people their bitterest enemies. Believing these things sincerely,
and believing nothing else, their hand is against every man, and the more
they are imprisoned the more is their dishonesty strengthened.”
This is, indeed, a doleful summing up of our present position and future
prospects as regards so large a percentage of those we build prisons for.
It is somewhat difficult to avoid a feeling of exasperation when, as an
honest man, and one who finds it at times a sore pinch to pay rates and
taxes, one contemplates the ugly, hopeless picture. Still, we should
never forget that these are creatures who are criminal not by their own
seeking. They are as they were born and bred and nurtured, and the only
way of relieving society of the pest they are against it, is to take all
the care we may to guard against the ravages of those we have amongst us,
and adopt measures for the prevention of their breeding a new generation.
How this may be accomplished is for legislators to decide. Hitherto it
has appeared as a phase of the criminal question that has attracted very
little attention on the part of our law makers. They appear, however, to
be waking up to its importance at last. Recently, in the House of Lords,
Lord Romilly suggested that the experiment might be tried of taking away
from the home of iniquity they were reared in the children of twice or
thrice convicted thieves above the age of ten years; taking them away for
good and all and placing them under State protection; educating them, and
giving them a trade. If I rightly recollect, his lordship’s suggestion
did not meet with a particularly hearty reception. Some of his hearers
were of opinion that it was setting a premium on crime, by affording the
habitual thief just that amount of domestic relief he in his selfishness
would be most desirous of. But Lord Romilly combated this objection with
the reasonable rejoinder, that by mere occupation the nature of the thief
was not abased below that of the brute, and that it was fair to assume
that so far from encouraging him to qualify himself for State patronage,
his dread of having his children taken from him might even check him in
his iniquitous career.
One thing, at least, is certain; it would come much _cheaper_ to the
country if these budding burglars and pickpockets were caught up, and
caged away from the community at large, before their natures became too
thoroughly pickled in the brine of rascality. Boy thieves are the most
mischievous and wasteful. They will mount a house roof, and for the sake
of appropriating the half-a-crown’s worth of lead that forms its gutter,
cause such damage as only a builder’s bill of twenty pounds or so will
set right. The other day a boy stole a family Bible valued at fifty
shillings, and after wrenching off the gilt clasps, threw the book into a
sewer; the clasps he sold to a marine store dealer for _twopence
halfpenny_! It may be fairly assumed that in the case of boy thieves,
who are so completely in the hands of others, that before they can “make”
ten shillings in cash, they must as a rule steal to the value of at least
four pounds, and sometimes double that sum. But let us put the loss by
exchange at its lowest, and say that he gets a fourth of the value of
what he steals, before he can earn eighteenpence a day, he must rob to
the amount of two guineas a week—a hundred and nine pounds a year!
Whatever less sum it costs the State to educate and clothe and teach him,
the nation would be in pocket.
It would be idle to attempt to trace back to its origin the incentive to
crime in the class of small criminals here treated of. Innocent of the
meaning of the term “strict integrity,” they are altogether unconscious
of offending against it. They may never repent, for they can feel no
remorse for having followed the dictates of their nature. No possible
good can arise from piecing and patching with creditable stuff the old
cloak of sin they were clothed in at their birth, and have worn ever
since, till it has become a second skin to them. ‘Before they can be of
any real service as members of an honest community, they must be
_reformed_ in the strictest sense of the term. Their tainted morality
must he laid bare to the very bones, as it were, and its rotten
foundation made good from its deepest layer. The arduousness of this
task it is hard to overrate; nothing, indeed, can be harder, except it be
to weed out from an adult criminal the tough and gnarled roots of sin
that grip and clasp about and strangle his better nature. And this
should be the child criminal reformer’s comfort and encouragement.
It must not be imagined, however, that the growth of juvenile criminality
is altogether confined to those regions where it is indigenous to the
soil; were it so, our prospects of relief would appear much more hopeful
than at present, for, as before stated, all that is necessary would be to
sow the baleful ground with the saving salt of sound and wholesome
teaching, and the ugly vegetation would cease.
But there are other and more formidable sources from which flow the
tributary streams that feed and keep at full flood our black sea of
crime; more formidable, because they do not take the shape of
irrepressible springs that make for the surface, simply because they are
impelled thereto by forces they have not the strength to combat against,
but rather of well planned artificial aqueducts and channels, and on the
development of which much of intellect is expended. It is much harder to
deal with the boy who, well knowing right from wrong, chooses the latter,
than with the boy who from the beginning has been wrong from not knowing
what right is.
Moreover, the boy who has been taught right from wrong, the boy who has
been sent to school and knows how to read, has this advantage over his
poor brother of the gutter—an advantage that tells with inexpressible
severity against the community at large; he has trainers who, discovering
his weakness, make it their profit and business to take him by the hand
and bring him along in that path of life to which his dishonest
inclination has called him.
I allude to those low-minded, nasty fellows, the proprietors and
promoters of what may be truthfully described as “gallows literature.”
As a curse of London, this one is worthy of a special niche in the temple
of infamy, and to rank first and foremost. The great difficulty would be
to find a sculptor of such surpassing skill as to be able to pourtray in
one carved stone face all the hideous vices and passions that should
properly belong to it. It is a stale subject, I am aware. In my humble
way, I have hammered at it both in newspapers and magazines, and many
better men have done the same. Therefore it is stale. For no other
reason. The iniquity in itself is as vigorous and hearty as ever, and
every week renews its brimstone leaves (meanwhile rooting deeper and
deeper in the soil that nourishes it), but unfortunately it comes under
the category of evils, the exposure of which the public “have had enough
of.” It is very provoking, and not a little disheartening, that it
should be so. Perhaps this complaint may be met by the answer: The
public are not tired of this one amongst the many abuses that afflict its
soul’s health, it is only tired of being reminded of it. Explorers in
fields less difficult have better fortune. As, for instance, the
fortunate discoverer of a gold field is. Everybody would be glad to
shake him by the hand—the hand that had felt and lifted the weight of the
nuggets and the yellow chips of dust; nay, not a few would be willing to
trim his finger nails, on the chance of their discovering beneath enough
of the auriferous deposit to pay them for their trouble. But, to be
sure, in a city of splendid commercial enterprise such as is ours, it can
scarcely be expected that that amount of honour would be conferred on the
man who would remove a plague from its midst as on the one whose
magnificent genius tended to fatten the money-bags in the Bank cellars.
At the risk, however, of being stigmatized as a man with a weakness for
butting against stone walls, I cannot let this opportunity slip, or
refrain from firing yet once again my small pop-gun against this fortress
of the devil. The reader may have heard enough of the abomination to
suit his taste, and let him rest assured that the writer has written more
than enough to suit _his_; but if every man set up his “taste” as the
goal and summit of his striving, any tall fellow a tip-toe might, after
all, see over the heads of most of us. The main difficulty is that the
tens and hundreds of thousands of boys who stint a penny from its more
legitimate use to purchase a dole of the pernicious trash in question,
have _not_ “had enough of it.” Nothing can be worse than this, except it
is that the purveyors of letter-press offal have not had enough of it
either, but, grown prosperous and muscular on the good feeding their
monstrous profits have ensured them, they are continually opening up
fresh ground, each patch fouler and more pestilent than the last.
At the present writing I have before me half-a-dozen of these penny
weekly numbers of “thrilling romance,” addressed to boys, and circulated
entirely among them—and girls. It was by no means because the number of
these poison pen’orths on sale is small that a greater variety was not
procured. A year or so since, wishing to write a letter on the subject
to a daily newspaper, I fished out of one little newsvendor’s shop,
situated in the nice convenient neighbourhood of Clerkenwell, which, more
than any other quarter of the metropolis, is crowded with working
children of both sexes, the considerable number of _twenty-three_ samples
of this gallows literature. But if I had not before suspected it, my
experience on that occasion convinced me that to buy more than a third of
that number would be a sheer waste of pence. To be sure, to expect
honest dealing on the part of such fellows as can dabble in “property” of
the kind in question, is in the last degree absurd, but one would think
that they would, for “business” reasons, maintain some show of giving a
pen’orth for a penny. Such is not the case, however. In three instances
in my twenty-three numbers, I found the self-same story published _twice_
under a different title, while for at least half the remainder the
variance from their brethren is so very slight that nobody but a close
reader would discover it.
The six-pen’orth before me include, “The Skeleton Band,” “Tyburn Dick,”
“The Black Knight of the Road,” “Dick Turpin,” “The Boy Burglar,” and
“Starlight Sall.” If I am asked, is the poison each of these papers
contains so cunningly disguised and mixed with harmless-seeming
ingredients, that a boy of shrewd intelligence and decent mind might be
betrayed by its insidious seductiveness? I reply, no. The only subtlety
employed in the precious composition is that which is employed in
preserving it from offending the blunt nostrils of the law to such a
degree as shall compel its interference. If it is again inquired, do I,
though unwillingly, acknowledge that the artful ones, by a wonderful
exercise of tact and ingenuity, place the law in such a fix that it would
not be justified in interfering? I most distinctly reply, that I
acknowledge nothing of the kind; but that, on the contrary, I wonder very
much at the clumsiness of a legislative machine that can let so much
scoundrelism slip through its cogs and snares.
The daring lengths these open encouragers of boy highwaymen and Tyburn
Dicks will occasionally go to serve their villanous ends is amazing. It
is not more than two or three years since, that a prosperous member of
the gang, whose business premises were in, or within a few doors of Fleet
Street, by way of giving a fair start to his published account of some
thief and murderer, publicly advertised that the buyers of certain
numbers would be entitled to a chance of a Prize in a grand distribution
of _daggers_. Specimens of the deadly weapons (made, it may be assumed,
after the same fashion as that one with which “flash Jack,” in the
romance, pinned the police officer in the small of his back) were
exhibited in the publisher’s shop window, and in due course found their
way into the hands of silly boys, with minds well primed for “daring
exploits,” by reading “numbers 2 and 3 given away with number 1.”
It is altogether a mistake, however, to suppose that the poison
publisher’s main element of success consists in his glorification of
robbers and cut-throats. To be sure he can by no means afford to
dispense with the ingredients mentioned in the concoction of his vile
brew, but his first and foremost reliance is on lewdness. Everything is
subservient to this. He will picture to his youthful readers a hero of
the highway, so ferocious in his nature, and so reckless of bloodshed,
that he has earned among his comrades the flattering nick-name of “the
Panther.” He will reveal the bold panther in all his glory, cleaving the
skull of the obstinate old gentleman in his travelling carriage, who will
not give up his money, or setting an old woman on the kitchen fire, as a
just punishment for hiding her guineas in the oven, in fishing them out
of which the panther burns his fingers; he will exhibit the crafty
“panther” wriggling his way through the floor boards of his cell, into a
sewer beneath, and through which he is to make his escape to the river,
and then by a flourish of his magic pen, he will convey the “panther” to
the “boudoir” of Starlight Sall, and show you how weak a quality valour
is in the presence of “those twin queens of the earth,” youth and beauty!
The brave panther, when he has once crossed the threshold of that
splendid damsel (who, by the way, is a thief, and addicted to drinking
brandy by the “bumper”) is, vulgarly speaking, “nowhere.” The haughty
curl of his lip, the glance of his eagle eye, “the graceful contour of
his manly form,” a mere gesture of which is sufficient to quell rising
mutiny amongst his savage crew, all fall flat and impotent before the
queenly majesty of Sall. But there is no fear that the reader will lose
his faith in Panther Bill, because of this weakness confessed. As drawn
by the Author (does the pestiferous rascal so style himself, I wonder?)
Starlight Sall is a creature of such exquisite loveliness, that Jupiter
himself might have knelt before her. She is such a matchless combination
of perfection, that it is found necessary to describe her charms
separately, and at such length that the catalogue of the whole extends
through at least six pages.
It is in this branch of his devilish business that the author of
“Starlight Sall” excels. It is evident that the man’s mind is in his
work, and he lingers over it with a loving hand. Never was there such a
tender anatomist. He begins Sall’s head, and revels in her auburn
tresses, that “in silken, snaky locks wanton o’er her shoulders, white as
eastern ivory.” He is not profound in foreheads, and hers he passes over
as “chaste as snow,” or in noses, Sall’s being described briefly as
“finely chiselled;” but he is well up in the language of eyes—the bad
language. He skirmishes playfully about those of Sall, and discourses of
her eyebrows as “ebon brow,” from which she launches her excruciating
shafts of love. He takes her by the eye-lashes, and describes them as
the “golden fringe that screens the gates of paradise,” and finally he
dips into Sall’s eyes, swimming with luscious languor, and pregnant with
tender inviting to Panther Bill, who was consuming in ardent affection,
as “the rippling waves of the bright blue sea to the sturdy swimmer.” It
is impossible here to repeat what else is said of the eyes of Starlight
Sall, or her teeth, “like rich pearls,” or of her “pouting coral lips, in
which a thousand tiny imps of love are lurking.” Bear it in mind that
this work of ours is designed for the perusal of thinking men and women;
that it is not intended as an amusing work, but as an endeavour to
pourtray to Londoners the curses of London in a plain and unvarnished
way, in hope that they may be stirred to some sort of absolution from
them. As need not be remarked, it would be altogether impossible to the
essayer of such a task, if he were either squeamish or fastidious in the
handling of the material at his disposal; but I _dare_ not follow our
author any further in his description of the personal beauties of
Starlight Sall. Were I to do so, it would be the fate of this book to be
flung into the fire, and every decent man who met me would regard himself
justified in kicking or cursing me; and yet, good fathers and mothers of
England—and yet, elder brothers and grown sisters, tons of this bird-lime
of the pit is vended in London every day of the Christian year.
Which of us can say that _his_ children are safe from the contamination?
Boys well-bred, as well as ill-bred, are mightily inquisitive about such
matters, and the chances are very clear, sir, that if the said bird-lime
were of a sort not more pernicious than that which sticks to the fingers,
we might at this very moment find the hands of my little Tom and your
little Jack besmeared with it. Granted, that it is unlikely, that it is
in the last degree improbable, even; still, the remotest of probabilities
have before now shown themselves grim actualities, and just consider for
a moment the twinge of horror that would seize on either of us were it to
so happen! Let us for a moment picture to ourselves our fright and
bewilderment, if we discovered that our little boys were feasting off
this deadly fruit in the secrecy of their chambers! Would it then appear
to us that it was a subject the discussion of which we had “had enough
of”? Should we be content, _then_, to shrug our shoulders after the old
style, and exclaim impatiently against the barbarous taste of writers who
were so tiresomely meddlesome? Not likely. The pretty consternation
that would ensue on the appalling discovery!—the ransacking of boxes and
cupboards, to make quite sure that no dreg of the poison, in the shape of
an odd page or so, were hidden away!—the painful examination of the
culprit, who never till now dreamt of the enormity of the thing he had
been doing!—the reviling and threatening that would be directed against
the unscrupulous news-agent who had supplied the pernicious pen’orth!
Good heavens! the tremendous rumpus there would be! But, thank God,
there is no fear of _that_ happening.
Is there not? What are the assured grounds of safety? Is it because it
stands to reason that all such coarse and vulgar trash finds its level
amongst the coarse and vulgar, and could gain no footing above its own
elevation? It may so stand in reason, but unfortunately it is the
unreasonable fact that this same pen poison finds customers at heights
above its natural low and foul water-line almost inconceivable. How
otherwise is it accountable that at least a _quarter of a million_ of
these penny numbers are sold weekly? How is it that in quiet suburban
neighbourhoods, far removed from the stews of London, and the pernicious
atmosphere they engender; in serene and peaceful semi-country towns where
genteel boarding schools flourish, there may almost invariably be found
some small shopkeeper who accommodatingly receives consignments of
“Blue-skin,” and the “Mysteries of London,” and unobtrusively supplies
his well-dressed little customer with these full-flavoured articles?
Granted, my dear sir, that your young Jack, or my twelve years old
Robert, have minds too pure either to seek out or crave after literature
of the sort in question, but not unfrequently it is found without
seeking. It is a contagious disease, just as cholera and typhus and the
plague are contagious, and, as everybody is aware, it needs not personal
contact with a body stricken to convey either of these frightful maladies
to the hale and hearty. A tainted scrap of rag has been known to spread
plague and death through an entire village, just as a stray leaf of
“Panther Bill,” or “‘Tyburn Tree” may sow the seeds of immorality amongst
as many boys as a town can produce.