ABSTRACT
Mary Young was born, according to this biography, in about 1704, and was hanged at Tyburn in 1741. The role of women in the criminal biographies of men has already been discussed; in this biography a woman is the main subject. As in The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard, the route into crime lies in the youth leaving the disciplined supervision of a working environment: Young was ‘reckon’d an extraordinary Workwoman with her Needle’ whilst she was under her ‘nurse’. Unlike Sheppard who is seduced from his apprenticeship by a woman, it is Young who removes herself from the relationship with her nurse: she has ‘an itching Desire to see London and Quarrelling with the old Woman who kept her’ she left. So, whereas Sheppard’s initial downfall is blamed on Lyon, Young’s downfall lies in her own desire for independence. It is as an independent woman that, like Lyon, she is powerful. Wishing to go to England from her home in Ireland, Young casts around for some means of financing her trip. She alights on ‘a young Fellow’ who is ‘very sollicitous to persuade her to become his Wife’, and she promises to marry him if he will get her to England. The man, who is ‘a Servant to a Gentleman of Fortune’, robs his master in order to pay for the trip. The text assures us that Young had no thought of crime at this stage, but then neither it seems did Lyon when she met Sheppard, and yet both are depicted as corrupting the men with whom they become involved. The source of that corruption is portrayed as lying not in any intentional action by Young or Lyon, but in the mere fact of their independent state which releases the tendency for corruption inherited by women from Eve.1
