WALKING AND FIELDING

 

I’ve been sorting my books – not ‘unpacking my library’ – I did that years back but 

I’m still trying to find a reasonable order for them.

 

And I happened to find my copy of The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2004) by Robert Shoemaker.    I opened it not quite at random and came across this extraordinary passage:

 

‘In 1776 John Fielding warned new arrivals to the city of the dangers of walking at night: “he will sometimes be liable to the more dangerous attacks of intemperate rakes in hot blood who occasionally by way of bravado, scower the streets, to shew their manhood, not their humanity; put the watch to flight; and now and then have murdered some harmless and inoffensive person.”’ This is from A Brief Description of the Cities of  London and Westminster.

 

The passage is illustrated by the engraving (anonymous as far as I can tell) ‘High Life At Midnight’ which is at the top of this post.

 

Shoemaker could have had left it there,  but he goes on:

 

‘The common themes of these attacks, which were public, unprovoked, committed by elite young men, often targeted at strangers (especially young women), involved an element of playfulness and were often described using the imagery of blood, suggest that the perpetrators were adolescents, possibly confused about their sexuality ..’

 

Well thanks Bob, that explains everything.

 

This is Sir John Fielding 

I don't know how much of a walker he was but he was an amazing man; half-brother of Henry Fielding (together they set up the Bow Street Runners), blinded in a naval accident at the age of 19, became a magistrate known as the Blind Beak and was supposedly able to recognize 3,000 criminals by the sound of their voices.