ABSTRACT
During the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century crime provided one of the principal subjects for popular literature. All aspects were covered: the crime itself, the investigation, the trial, the punishment and the life of the offender. The works ranged from newspaper articles through broadsheets and pamphlets to large books, sometimes in several volumes. This book focuses on biographical pamphlets, that is, pamphlets which took as their subjects real people, who had been accused of, usually, a capital crime. Some of these pamphlets proclaim themselves to be autobiographies, although, as is argued later in this General Introduction, it is not easy to decide whether such claims were true or even partly true. These criminal biographies have been the subject of much controversy amongst modern scholars. There is, for example, an argument about the role they played in the development of the novel, and certainly some of the techniques which appear in them were also used by novelists, such as Defoe in Moll Flanders. The problem is further complicated by the claim, which is hard to substantiate, that novelists like Defoe also wrote criminal biographies, and by the difficulty in separating ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in the biographies. One thing is certain: the criminal biography, which became firmly established in the eighteenth century, continues to flourish up to the present day.
