ABSTRACT
James Dalton was, according to this biography, born in 1700; he was hanged at Tyburn in 1730. The only physical description we have of him is that, during the last year of his life, he was said to have been ‘a little Man’.1 The lives of James Dalton and John Sheppard were connected through Jonathan Wild, the thief-taker and thief-organizer, and his ‘creatures’, most notably William Field, the petty criminal and informer, who survived Wild and who appears in both biographies. From 1720 to 1730 Dalton made perhaps as many as six appearances at the Old Bailey, either as a defendant or, to avoid prosecution, as a witness for the Crown. But it was in 1728 that he gained real notoriety when he escaped prosecution by informing against a large number of his comrades-some contemporaries said it was as many as twelve-and by appearing as the chief witness at the trials of six of them. This biography says that he went abroad soon afterwards in order to escape vengeance. In any event he was back in England by, probably, late 1729, and was soon in prison again, this time for an attempted robbery on the famous physician, Dr Mead. He was sentenced in 1730 to a prison-term for that offence, but shortly afterwards he was tried, condemned and hanged for robbing John Waller. However, there was some doubt as to whether this offence actually took place, and, indeed, Waller was later convicted of bringing false charges of robbery against others in order to obtain the large rewards offered. Waller may have worked on his own, but it is tempting to speculate that those who had seen Dalton escape in 1728 at the expense of their friends or relatives, approved of, and maybe even assisted in, the prosecution. Certainly, an unknown woman had thrown a bottle at him when he was on trial for attempting to rob Mead.
