AS Captain Hind was master of the road, George Barrington was (and
remains for ever) the absolute monarch of pickpockets. Though the art,
superseding the cutting of purses, had been practised with courage and
address for half a century before Barrington saw the light, it was his
own incomparable genius that raised thievery from the dangerous valley
of experiment, and set it, secure and honoured, upon the mountain height
of perfection. To a natural habit of depredation, which, being a man
of letters, he was wont to justify, he added a sureness of hand,
a fertility of resource, a recklessness of courage which drove his
contemporaries to an amazed respect, and from which none but the
Philistine will withhold his admiration. An accident discovered his
taste and talent. At school he attempted to kill a companion--the one
act of violence which sullies a strangely gentle career; and outraged
at the affront of a flogging, he fled with twelve guineas and a gold
repeater watch. A vulgar theft this, and no presage of future greatness;
yet it proves the fearless greed, the contempt of private property,
which mark as with a stigma the temperament of the prig. His faculty did
not rust long for lack of use, and at Drogheda, when he was but sixteen,
he encountered one Price, half barnstormer, half thief. Forthwith he
embraced the twin professions, and in the interlude of more serious
pursuits is reported to have made a respectable appearance as Jaffier in
Venice Preserved. For a while he dreamed of Drury Lane and glory; but an
attachment for Miss Egerton, the Belvidera to his own Jaffier, was more
costly than the barns of Londonderry warranted, and, with Price for a
colleague, he set forth on a tour of robbery, merely interrupted through
twenty years by a few periods of enforced leisure.
His youth, indeed, was his golden age. For four years he practised his
art, chilled by no shadow of suspicion, and his immunity was due as
well to his excellent bearing as to his sleight of hand. In one of the
countless chap-books which dishonour his fame, he is unjustly accused
of relying for his effects upon an elaborate apparatus, half knife,
half scissors, wherewith to rip the pockets of his victims. The mere
backbiting of envy! An artistic triumph was never won save by legitimate
means; and the hero who plundered the Dulce of L--r at Ranelagh, who
emptied the pockets of his acquaintance without fear of exposure,
who all but carried off the priceless snuff-box of Count Orloff, most
assuredly followed his craft in full simplicity and with a proper
scorn of clumsy artifice. At his first appearance he was the master,
sumptuously apparelled, with Price for valet. At Dublin his birth and
quality were never questioned, and when he made a descent upon London
it was in company with Captain W. H--n, who remained for years his loyal
friend. He visited Brighton as the chosen companion of Lord Ferrers
and the wicked Lord Lyttelton. His manners and learning were alike
irresistible. Though the picking of pockets was the art and interest of
his life, he was on terms of easy familiarity with light literature,
and he considered no toil too wearisome if only his conversation might
dazzle his victims. Two maxims he charactered upon his heart: the one,
never to run a large risk for a small gain; the other, never to forget
the carriage and diction of a gentleman.
He never stooped to pilfer, until exposure and decay had weakened his
hand. In his first week at Dublin he carried off £1000, and it was only
his fateful interview with Sir John Fielding that gave him poverty for a
bedfellow. Even at the end, when he slunk from town to town, a notorious
outlaw, he had inspirations of his ancient magnificence, and--at
Chester--he eluded the vigilance of his enemies and captured
£600, wherewith he purchased some months of respectability. Now,
respectability was ever dear to him, and it was at once his pleasure and
profit to live in the highest society. Were it not blasphemy to sully
Barrington with slang you would call him a member of the swell-mob, but,
having cultivated a grave and sober style for himself, he recoiled in
horror from the flash lingo, and his susceptibility demands respect.
He kept a commonplace book! Was ever such thrift in a thief? Whatever
images or thoughts flashed through his brain, he seized them on paper,
even 'amidst the jollity of a tavern, or in the warmth of an interesting
conversation.' Was it then strange that he triumphed as a man of
fashionable and cultured leisure? He would visit Ranelagh with the
most distinguished, and turn a while from epigram and jest to empty the
pocket of a rich acquaintance. And ever with so tactful a certainty,
with so fine a restraint of the emotions, that suspicion was
preposterous. To catalogue his exploits is superfluous, yet let it be
recorded that once he went to Court, habited as a clergyman, and came
home the richer for a diamond order, Lord C--'s proudest decoration.
Even the assault upon Prince Orloff was nobly planned. Barrington had
precise intelligence of the marvellous snuff-box--the Empress's own gift
to her lover; he knew also how he might meet the Prince at Drury Lane;
he had even discovered that the Prince for safety hid the jewel in his
vest. But the Prince felt the Prig's hand upon the treasure, and gave an
instant alarm. Over-confidence, maybe, or a too liberal dinner was the
cause of failure, and Barrington, surrounded in a moment, was speedily
in the lock-up. It was the first rebuff that the hero had received, and
straightway his tact and ingenuity left him. The evidence was faulty,
the prosecution declined, and naught was necessary for escape save
presence of mind. Even friends were staunch, and had Barrington told his
customary lie, his character had gone unsullied. Yet having posed for
his friends as a student of the law, at Bow Street he must needs declare
himself a doctor, and the needless discrepancy ruined him. Though he
escaped the gallows, there was an end to the diversions of intellect and
fashion; as he discovered when he visited the House of Lords to hear an
appeal, and Black Rod ejected him at the persuasion of Mr. G--. As yet
unused to insult, he threatened violence against the aggressor, and
finding no bail he was sent on his first imprisonment to the Bridewell
in Tothill Fields. Rapid, indeed, was the descent. At the first grip of
adversity, he forgot his cherished principles, and two years later the
loftiest and most elegant gentlemen that ever picked a pocket was at the
Hulks--for robbing a harlot at Drury Lane! Henceforth, his insolence
and artistry declined, and, though to the last there were intervals of
grandeur, he spent the better part of fifteen years in the commission of
crimes, whose very littleness condemned them. At last an exile from St.
James's and Ranelagh, he was forced into a society which still further
degraded him. Hitherto he had shunned the society of professed thieves;
in his golden youth he had scorned to shelter him in the flash kens,
which were the natural harbours of pickpockets. But now, says his
biographer, he began to seek evil company, and, the victim of his own
fame, found safety only in obscene concealment.
At the Hulks he recovered something of his dignity, and discretion
rendered his first visit brief enough. Even when he was committed on a
second offence, and had attempted suicide, he was still irresistible,
and he was discharged with several years of imprisonment to run. But,
in truth, he was born for honour and distinction, and common actions,
common criminals, were in the end distasteful to him. In his heyday
he stooped no further than to employ such fences as might profitably
dispose of his booty, and the two partners of his misdeeds were both
remarkable.
James, the earlier accomplice affected clerical attire, and in 1791 'was
living in a Westphalian monastery, to which he some years ago retired,
in an enviable state of peace and penitence, respected for his talents,
and loved for his amiable manners, by which he is distinguished in an
eminent degree.' The other ruffian, Lowe by name, was known to his own
Bloomsbury Square for a philanthropic and cultured gentleman, yet only
suicide saved him from the gallows. And while Barrington was wise in the
choice of his servants, his manners drove even strangers to admiration.
Policemen and prisoners were alike anxious to do him honour. Once when
he needed money for his own defence, his brother thieves, whom he had
ever shunned and despised, collected £100 for the captain of their
guild. Nor did gaoler and judge ever forget the respect due to a
gentleman. When Barrington was tried and condemned for the theft of Mr.
Townsend's watch at Enfield Races--September 15, 1790, was the day of
his last transgression--one knows not which was the more eloquent in his
respect, the judge or the culprit.
But it was not until the pickpocket set out for Botany Bay that he took
full advantage of his gentlemanly bearing. To thrust 'Mr.' Barrington
into the hold was plainly impossible, even though transportation
for seven years was his punishment. Wherefore he was admitted to
the boatswain's mess, was allowed as much baggage as a first-class
passenger, and doubtless beguiled the voyage (for others) with the
information of a well-stored mind. By an inspiration of luck he checked
a mutiny, holding the quarter-deck against a mob of ruffians with
no weapon but a marline-spike. And hereafter, as he tells you in his
'Voyage to New South Wales,' he was accorded the fullest liberty to come
or go. He visited many a foreign port with the officers of the ship; he
packed a hundred note-books with trite and superfluous observations;
he posed, in brief, as the captain of the ship without responsibility.
Arrived at Port Jackson, he was acclaimed a hero, and received with
obsequious solicitude by the Governor, who promised that his 'future
situation should be such as would render his banishment from England as
little irksome as possible.' Forthwith he was appointed high constable
of Paramatta, and, like Vautrin, who might have taken the youthful
Barrington for another Rastignac, he ended his days the honourable
custodian of less fortunate convicts. Or, as a broadside ballad has it,
He left old Drury's flash purlieus,
To turn at last a copper.
Never did he revert to his ancient practice. If in his youth he had
lived the double-life with an effrontery and elegance which Brodie
himself never attained, henceforth his career was single in its
innocence. He became a prig in the less harmful and more offensive
sense. After the orthodox fashion he endeared himself to all who knew
him, and ruled Paramatta with an equable severity. Having cultivated the
humanities for the base purposes of his trade, he now devoted himself
to literature with an energy of dulness, becoming, as it were, a liberal
education personified. His earlier efforts had been in verse, and you
wonder that no enterprising publisher had ventured on a limited edition.
Time was he composed an ode to Light, and once recovering from a fever
contracted at Ballyshannon, he addressed a few burning lines to Hygeia:
Hygeia! thou whose eyes display
The lustre of meridian day;
and so on for endless couplets. Then, had he not celebrated in immortal
verse his love for Miss Egerton, untimely drowned in the waters of
the Boyne? But now, as became the Constable of Paramatta, he chose the
sterner medium, and followed up his 'Voyage to New South Wales' with
several exceeding trite and valuable histories.
His most ambitious work was dedicated in periods of unctuous piety
to his Majesty King George III., and the book's first sentence is
characteristic of his method and sensibility: 'In contemplating the
origin, rise, and fall of nations, the mind is alternately filled with
a mixture of sacred pain and pleasure.' Would you read further? Then you
will find Fauna and Flora, twin goddesses of ineptitude, flitting across
the page, unreadable as a geographical treatise. His first masterpiece
was translated into French, anno VI., and the translator apologises that
war with England alone prevents the compilation of a suitable biography.
Was ever thief treated with so grave a consideration?
Then another work was prefaced by the Right Hon. William Eden, and
all were 'embellished with beautiful coloured plates,' and ran through
several editions. Once only did he return to poetry, the favoured medium
of his youth, and he returned to write an imperishable line. Even then
his pedantry persuaded him to renounce the authorship, and to disparage
the achievement. The occasion was the opening of a theatre at Sydney,
wherein the parts were sustained by convicts. The cost of admission to
the gallery was one shilling, paid in money, flour, meat, or spirits.
The play was entitled The Revenge and the Hotel, and Barrington provided
the prologue, which for one passage is for ever memorable. Thus it runs:
From distant climes, o'er widespread seas, we come,
Though not with much eclat or beat of drum;
True patriots we, for be it understood,
We left our country for our country's good.
No private views disgraced our generous zeal,
What urged our travels was our country's weal;
And none will doubt, but that our emigration
Has proved most useful to the British nation.
'We left our country for our country's good.' That line, thrown
fortuitously into four hundred pages of solid prose, has emerged to
become the common possession of Fleet Street. It is the man's one title
to literary fame, for spurning the thievish practice he knew so well,
he was righteously indignant when The London Spy was fathered upon
him. Though he emptied his contemporary's pockets of many thousands,
he enriched the Dictionary of Quotations with one line, which will be
repeated so long as there is human hand to wield a pen. And, if the High
Constable of Paramatta was tediously respectable, George Barrington, the
Prig, was a man of genius.