The Steal (5 page)

According to Alexis de Tocqueville, who on his trip to America transcribed the remarks of Sam Houston, the governor of Tennessee, theft was unknown before the Europeans arrived. “Since then it has been necessary to make laws to prevent theft. Among the Creeks who are beginning to get civilized and have a written penal code, theft is punished by strokes of the whip.”

Lacking the tradition of a king as well as England’s volume of luxury goods and rigid class system, shoplifting did not immediately catch on in the colonies. Some transported shoplifters continued to practice their crime here, of course. But although the first colonial Americans occasionally hanged thieves and printed their confessions in chapbooks for all to read, many colonies, establishing their own laws, preferred shame punishment. Pennsylvania required restitution be four times the amount of the stolen item. New Englanders favored the ducking stool, the stocks, and the pillory for theft. Overall, Americans reserved hanging for witchcraft, sodomy, espionage, and adultery.

Shoplifting by slaves in colonial America was often treated by the courts as a precursor to flight or other rebellion and was punished severely regardless of the amount stolen. Hannah, an eighteen-year-old mulatto slave who stole “as much Bristol stuff as would make her a Gown and Pettycoat,” as well as a handkerchief and a small piece of calico fabric, because her mistress left her naked in the North, would have been fined, branded, or sold to meet a debt. In some states in the South, she might have been hanged.

Men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers opposed capital punishment for theft. Thomas Jefferson proposed its abolition as early as 1776. But when the House of Delegates voted on his proposal nine years later, it was defeated. (Outrage over horse thieves killed it.) “Crimes against property; the punishment in most countries immensely disproportionate to the crime,” Jefferson wrote in 1792, by which time the majority of states had replaced capital punishment for minor property crimes with public labor and imprisonment.

American writing about theft in general and shoplifting in particular evolved from cautionary tales to Barnumesque bragging. Published in 1803, the first American thief’s memoir, more mocking and prurient than redemptive and contrite, casts off shame more dramatically than any British confessions that preceded it. Seth Wyman’s
The Life and Adventures of Seth Wyman
not only anticipates our criminal tell-alls today but also presents a new kind of shoplifter.

Wyman is no roaring girl or queen of thieves, as shoplifters were sometimes called. He is a thieving Davy Crockett who crows about his meanness and his quick fingers as skills necessary to survive in the New World. He is a rugged individualist who makes his living by shoplifting. He was born in 1784, in Goffstown, New Hampshire, to a prosperous farmer, another Seth Wyman who fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill, and “a kind, noble-hearted” mother. He writes, “Nothing was valued by me unless I had succeeded in pilfering it . . . and the more value I was obliged to take in stealing an article, the higher I valued it.” Wyman began as a toddler stealing shiny silver coins. At thirteen, he stole “a loaf of sugar” from some soldiers. Later, fortified with brandy, he graduated to shoplifting, stealing guns from gunsmiths, gingerbread cakes from bakeries, and cloth from dry-goods stores. He bought a cloak “capacious enough to hold a small family and a pig” and stole mink furs and seven pairs of gloves from an English dry-goods store. Later, after he seduced a tailoress, he had her sew shoplifted cloth into garments. Wyman shoplifted both for his own pleasure and to impress “the fair sex.” Imprisoned several times in Massachusetts, he redoubled his larceny when released, only slowing down after marrying a widow who bore him six children.

A thief practically from the cradle, Wyman is yet a representative figure. At times, Americans have celebrated shoplifting’s most confessional, violent, and liberational aspects, and at other times have excessively punished the crime. The roots of our forays into shoplifting as a revolutionary act, an aspirational transaction, and a reimagining of the self lie in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

When the first trial of a shoplifter who was not a prostitute or a professional took place in England in the spring of 1800, it turned on the question of whether she really stole or whether she was a victim of dishonest shopkeepers. The trial is notorious because this alleged shoplifter belonged to literary royalty: Jane Leigh Perrot was Jane Austen’s aunt. Nine months earlier, she was fifty-four years old and living with her husband in an estate outside Bath and in a house in town. Childless, she suffered from many infirmities, as did her husband.

On the afternoon of August 8, 1799, Leigh Perrot traveled from her country estate to Bath for the day and bought a card of black lace from the milliner’s at the south end of Bath Street. The clerk wrapped it up for her. Leigh Perrot left the shop to meet her husband, and they strolled together through the streets. As they passed the milliner’s, one of the shopkeepers, a Miss Gregory, ran out to meet them and demanded that Leigh Perrot unwrap her parcel. When Leigh Perrot complied, Gregory found, in addition to the black lace, a card of unpaid-for white lace. Leigh Perrot said that Gregory must have mistakenly rolled it in with the black lace, but right there on the street the woman accused her of shoplifting. According to a pamphlet published at her trial, Leigh Perrot “trembled very much . . . and coloured as red as scarlet.”

Gregory and her colleagues waited to formally complain to the mayor, who was occupied with a phalanx of soldiers heading through town. Three days after the alleged shoplifting took place, Leigh Perrot received an anonymous note threatening to tell her friends that she was a thief. Two days later, the mayor and the magistrates arrived at Leigh Perrot’s house to arrest her, and though they “lamented their being obliged to commit me . . . to prison I was sent.”

Had she been poor, Leigh Perrot would have spent the next seven months in Ilchester Gaol, a day’s journey from Bath. Instead, she bribed the warden to stay in his home while she awaited trial. Her husband accompanied her. Although Leigh Perrot could wear her own clothes, she had to eat the greasy toast served by the warden’s wife. While at the warden’s, Mr. Leigh Perrot received another anonymous letter, this one maintaining that her blackmailer was the shop owner, Mr. Gye. Writing to her cousin Montague Cholmeley in September of that year, Mrs. Leigh Perrot explains the plot as she understands it thus far: Gye, with Miss Gregory’s help, framed her for shoplifting, hoping to get paid off for keeping quiet about it. In league with pawnbrokers and fences, he had already tried the same trick on several other unsuspecting shoppers. In October, London judges denied Leigh Perrot’s request to be released on bail.

That trial began on the morning of Saturday, March 29, 1800, seven months after Leigh Perrot’s arrest, in the Great Castle Hall in Somerset, the site of the 1685 Bloody Assizes, when the notorious Judge Jeffreys sentenced 139 people to death for treason. (Thirty-eight were eventually hanged.) Measuring eighty by twenty feet, the hall could hold two thousand people. That day it was so full that “hundreds” were nearly “pressed to death” and “suffocated,” a magazine covering the trial reported.

Three pamphlets about the trial were later printed. One contained a diagram of the shop interior laying out for readers how Leigh Perrot might have shoplifted the lace while the clerk turned her back. In court, Leigh Perrot’s friends wept. The accused wore a hat adorned with black lace trim and looked “pale and emaciated.” A supposedly neutral eyewitness testified that she saw the alleged shoplifter tuck the lace into her cloak that day in the store. (Leigh Perrot would later object, saying she had not been wearing a cloak.) Mary Kent swore that, having purchased four pairs of gloves at Gye’s store, she discovered, upon arriving home, that the package contained five pairs.

One of Leigh Perrot’s lawyers, a Mr. Jekyll, delivered what has now become a standard defense for wealthy shoplifters: the absurdity of a woman of Leigh Perrot’s stature shoplifting. On this point, Leigh Perrot dictated a statement to Jekyll, who read it in court: “Placed in a situation the most eligible that any woman could desire, with supplies so ample that I was left rich after every wish was gratified; blessed in the affections of the most generous man as a husband, what could induce me to commit such a crime?”

After seven hours of testimony, the jurors—local tradesmen and a schoolteacher—acquitted Leigh Perrot in fifteen minutes. The audience applauded when the verdict was read. But some of Leigh Perrot’s enemies were unappeased. They discussed distributing a caricature of her husband’s crest with a parrot holding a piece of lace in its beak. The week after the trial, Leigh Perrot complained to her cousins: “That these wretches had marked
me
for somebody timid enough to be Scared and
Rich
enough to pay handsomely rather than go through the terrible Proceedings of a public Trial nobody doubts; and by timing it when I had only my Husband with me they were sure that I could have no Evidence against them.”

Publicly vindicated, she lived to the age of ninety-two.

Not so fast. In the 1980s, Austen scholars began to unearth new material concluding that Leigh Perrot was a kleptomaniac
avant la lettre
. One recent literary study dredges up an observation from 1832: Thirty years after the trial, her lawyer Joseph Jekyll “considered Mrs. L.P. was a kleptomaniac.” A university acquaintance of a distant descendent of Leigh Perrot had it on his authority (according to annotations in a manuscript copy of
Northanger Abbey
in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) that Leigh Perrot enjoyed stealing. One of her contemporaries reported that Leigh Perrot stole a plant from a nursery four years after the shoplifting charge. Another contemporary, a vicar of a nearby parish, accused Leigh Perrot of buying off the prosecutor. The fate of Jane Austen’s aunt invites comparison to our celebrity shoplifting trials today, except that in our ravenously aspirational, democratic world, a jury would likely find her guilty.

Whereas Leigh Perrot’s story has been told and retold, the story of Whig Party members fighting to end the Shoplifting Act remains less known. The loudest voice was that of Sir Samuel Romilly, distinguished lawyer, abolitionist, uncle of Peter Roget (creator of
Roget’s Thesaurus
), and friend of prison reformer Jeremy Bentham. After the French Revolution, Romilly spent time in Paris, where he was impressed by the work of Denis Diderot and other Enlightenment figures, especially by Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 essay, “On Crimes and Punishments,” which argued that the certainty of punishment—not its severity—deterred crime. But Romilly’s crusade against the Shoplifting Act met strong and unique opposition, unlike capital punishment for pickpocketing, which he succeeded in abolishing immediately.

In 1810, Romilly failed to get the Shoplifting Act repealed in the House of Lords, despite presenting anecdotes and statistics showing that hanging shoplifters did not deter stealing. One of Romilly’s opponents, Mr. Windham, asked, “Had not the French Revolution begun with the abolition of capital punishments in every case?” Romilly’s most committed adversary, Lord Ellenborough, warned, “I trust your lordships will pause before you assent to an experiment pregnant with danger.” Asked whether he considered disemboweling to be a suitable form of punishment, Ellenborough sided with those who supported barbaric ancient sentences. Without hanging, he declared, all that was left was transportation, which criminals viewed as “a summer airing by an easy migration to a milder climate.” Those who voted against Romilly’s proposition in 1810 included the archbishop of Canterbury and a number of bishops, who contended that overturning capital punishment against pickpocketing several years prior had led to an explosion of that crime, an assertion Romilly disputed, arguing that these divines had conflated more prosecutions with more crime.

Romilly brought up the Shoplifting Act again in 1811, and yet again in 1813, when the vote tilted more to his side—seventy-two yeas as opposed to eleven in 1810—and thirty-four nays. His proposal again failed in the House of Lords. Three years later, not even Romilly’s poignant story of a ten-year-old boy awaiting death in Newgate Prison for shoplifting could sway the Lords. In his memoir, Romilly accused his opponents of wanting to “make an example” of the boy. In 1818, the
Morning Chronicle
printed an eloquent speech Romilly made in the House of Commons on what would be his last attempt to overturn the Shoplifting Act. Later that year, Romilly killed himself over grief at his beloved wife Catherine’s death.

By the time Romilly’s friend, the Scottish legal reformer and lawyer James Mackintosh, took up the cause of repealing the Shoplifting Act two years later, Tory zeal for maintaining it had evaporated. Mackintosh managed to raise the hanging threshold on the monetary amount of the item shoplifted from five to ten shillings. Still, in 1821, sixteen people were hanged for shoplifting. But the following year, the reformers prevailed: The last shoplifter was hanged. In 1832, the House of Lords declassified shoplifting as a capital crime and ended transportation of shoplifters in the bargain.

These legal shifts were due less to Mackintosh’s advocacy than a general embracing in England of Enlightenment ideas about crime and punishment. The appointment of the reformer Sir Robert Peel as Home Secretary in 1822 helped. Interested in reforming criminal law, Peel worked to make all of the Bloody Code, including the Shoplifting Act, obsolete. To compensate, he replaced the plainclothes thief catcher with a modern, uniformed British policeman—the bobby—to arrest shoplifters and other petty criminals. Thus Peel turned catching shoplifters into a legitimate occupation, if not a vocation.

Once the Shoplifting Act was decapitalized, British writers repudiated it. Living in Bath as a child, Thomas De Quincey must have been inspired to base his novella
The Household Wreck
on Leigh Perrot’s misfortune. But he added a gothic twist. In the 1838 novella, Mr. Barrett, upon being romantically spurned, frames the saintly (and married) Agnes for having “that morning secreted in her muff, and feloniously carried away, a valuable piece of Mechlin lace.” Agnes dies in jail. Narrated from the point of view of Agnes’s bereaved husband,
The Household Wreck
is a cautionary tale about petty theft transforming an ordinary individual—the husband—into a wreck. But it also depicts a nineteenth-century crowd’s transformation at witnessing the hanging of a wealthy shoplifter. “By that time all the world was agitated with the case . . . the nation was convulsed and divided.” First published in serial form in 1841,
Barnaby Rudge
, Charles Dickens’s novel about the Gordon Riots, uses the furor that erupted over Mary Jones’s shoplifting to arraign Victorian attitudes toward the crime. Dickens’s hangman, Ned Dennis, wonders how future generations will judge a nation that killed a starving woman for shoplifting.