Once you start looking for them, rogues are everywhere in the early modern city. Not only was the term a common insult in the streets, but as Lena Liapi shows in her illuminating monograph they also danced across the pages of many pamphlets, plays and ballads of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This book focuses on the way that these figures were depicted in print from around the 1590s to the 1680s, investigating and comparing over a hundred different publications from this period that narrate the exploits of highwaymen, pickpockets, fraudsters and various combinations thereof.
Previous work on roguery has tended to pay little if any attention to how this concept changed during the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, so Liapi provides an important contribution to the field through this alone. More importantly, her analysis also offers a distinctive reading of these pamphlets that challenges some previous assumptions. Specifically, whereas scholars have often claimed that such publications demonized and marginalized criminals and the poor by depicting a supposed ‘underworld’ that inverted well-ordered society, Liapi argues that ‘rogue’ literature was full of multivalent and ambiguous texts that often pushed in the opposite direction. Across her four core chapters, she shows that rogues could be used to satirize the urban elites, promote plebeian sociability and – especially in the 1650s – offer thinly veiled political critique.
The book's first two chapters explain how rogue literature was a product of the vast expansion in cheap print in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The number of publications was reasonably stable from the 1590s to the 1630s, before rising in the 1650s and 1660s. These pamphlets evolved over the period, shifting in terms of format, style and marketing in parallel with wider developments in the print trade. Although only a few specific readers can be pinned down with any confidence, Liapi's argument that the publications had a broad appeal and reached a social diverse audience is persuasive. She pushes this analysis further by showing how they were a ‘hybrid’ genre which borrowed ‘various elements found in satires, romances, news pamphlets, and jest-books’ (p. 18). Rather than simply being condemnatory, in these texts rogues were frequently presented as witty and admirable while their victims might be immoral or corrupt. Particularly likely to be satirized were hypocritical wealthy citizens – such as usurers and landlords – or dishonest civic officers such as gaol keepers. Through these narratives, the pamphlets served as both amusing entertainment and occasionally sharp social critique.
Liapi's second two main chapters continue to draw primarily on pamphlets but shift the lens slightly to include analysis of how these related to the actual lives of rogues, their communities and the wider political situation. She uses some records from London's criminal courts alongside the published texts to explore the dynamics of trust and familiarity in the Elizabethan and early Stuart metropolis. For example, many of the stories recounted in both legal depositions and rogue pamphlets ‘were predicated on an abuse of trust (feigning friendship or familiarity) but they also show willingness to trust’ (p. 100), in contrast to the claims of increasing urban anomie made by some earlier scholars. The networks of sociability and friendship that allowed criminal tricksters to ply their trade were not an ‘anti-society’ of deviants and outsiders but instead were integral to everyday life in London. Liapi also shows that the very real political divisions of the 1640s and especially 1650s became embedded in rogue literature, as royalists were increasingly associated with the figure of the highwayman and with later rakish duelling ‘hectors’. While parliamentarian texts sought to use these associations to attack cavaliers, many other pamphlets and printed news seem to have embraced this link. In the latter, royalist highwaymen like James Hind – the focus of 13 pamphlets – bravely and wittily robbed hypocritical parliamentarian officials. These chapters demonstrate that the so-called ‘rogue literature’ was not simply a literary genre – it was closely tied to the everyday lives and popular politics of many of its readers.
The book will be of great interest to urban historians thanks to its unapologetic focus on London and its environs. Indeed, a key argument here is that the ‘rogue literature’ was deeply metropolitan in both its text and context. In contrast, two themes that are prominent in other research on ‘roguery’ receive minimal attention in this study: poverty and mobility. The contrasting approach here is valuable but does mean that it should be read alongside the work of scholars like A.L. Beier, David Hitchcock and Patricia Fumerton, who explore these other aspects. Ultimately, Liapi's monograph provides a new perspective on this fascinating early modern phenomenon, which will be illuminating for students of urban crime and of city life more broadly.
