In the dim workshops of early Georgian London, a boy barely into his teens finds himself infected by a disease he does not understand, and in his desperate ignorance he becomes something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his story with the blunt clarity of a court record: a fatherless apprentice, left to the mercy of older hands, absorbing the worst possible counsel from the men around him.
James Booty is no hardened criminal when his life begins to unravel; he is a child without capacity, as the old text puts it, adrift in a world that offers him nothing but cruel superstition. His case stands as one of the earliest documented episodes in the long lineage of true crime writing, where youth and depravity collide in ways that still disturb.
What follows is a tale shaped by ignorance, infection, and the pitiless logic of eighteenth century justice closing in on a boy who scarcely comprehends his own actions.
The full account awaits in the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; press your ear close now and let the story speak for itself.
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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
Peruke-maker: a peruke is the formal word for what we now casually call a wig. A peruke-maker crafted those elaborate powdered creations that sat atop Georgian heads; it was a skilled trade and a respectable living, placing the Booty family squarely in the artisan class of Holborn.
Foul distemper: this is the text’s euphemism for venereal disease, almost certainly syphilis or gonorrhoea. In the eighteenth century, ‘distemper’ could mean any illness or bodily disorder; adding ‘foul’ before it was the polite way of saying the unspeakable.
Made a shift: today ‘making a shift’ sounds like rearranging furniture, but in this period it simply meant managing with difficulty or contriving to do something. The boy made a shift to learn the cause of his pain: he scraped together enough information from those around him to understand what afflicted him.
Sound: in modern speech, ‘sound’ means reliable or healthy in a general sense. In Georgian medical language it carried a much more specific meaning: free from disease, particularly venereal infection. To lie with someone who was ‘sound’ was the supposed cure; a lethal piece of folk superstition.
Sessions: the regular sittings of the criminal court, held at the Old Bailey in London. Cases were tried in batches at these sessions, often at breakneck speed; a prisoner might wait weeks in Newgate only to be tried, convicted and sentenced in a single day.
Newgate: London’s most infamous prison, a name that carried dread for centuries. By 1722 it was already ancient, filthy, and overcrowded; a place where disease killed almost as efficiently as the gallows that awaited beyond its walls.
Tyburn: the principal site of public execution in London, located near what is now Marble Arch. Condemned prisoners were carted through the streets to Tyburn in a grim procession that served as both spectacle and warning; the gallows there were known simply as ‘the tree.’
Infant criminals: the text uses ‘infant’ not in the modern sense of a baby but in its older legal meaning: a person under the age of majority. That the law could condemn a child to the same gallows as a grown murderer reveals how differently Georgian England understood youth, responsibility, and mercy.
About This Series
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.
The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.
True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.
The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.
