Richard Whittingham is barely past boyhood when he abandons his apprenticeship and steps into London’s criminal underworld. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts, his downfall begins not with malice but with weakness: an easy temper exploited by the wrong company and the relentless demands of women who trade affection for coin.
His story is the kind of true crime narrative that reveals how quickly a young life can unravel in Georgian London. Whittingham is not born a villain; he is made one, piece by piece, by appetite and circumstance, until the streets themselves become his trade.
The world he enters is one of coordinated violence and fragile loyalty, where the very companions who share the spoils are also the ones most likely to turn. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals lays bare every detail of this descent in its own unflinching prose; listen now and hear it told aloud.
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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.
Footpad: today the word means nothing to most people, but in the eighteenth century it was instantly understood and deeply feared. A footpad was a robber who worked on foot, as opposed to the more glamorous highwayman on horseback. There was nothing romantic about a footpad; they were street-level predators who relied on speed, surprise and numbers.
Hot-presser: this was a tradesman who used heated plates to press and finish cloth, giving fabric a smooth and lustrous surface. It was a respectable trade, the kind of steady apprenticeship that might have kept a young man out of trouble; Whittingham chose otherwise.
Cutting off women’s pockets: today a pocket is sewn into a garment, but in the early eighteenth century women wore separate pouches tied around the waist beneath their skirts. Thieves would literally slice the strings and snatch the pocket away. This is also the origin of the term ‘pickpocket,’ though the method here was closer to outright robbery.
Impeached: we think of impeachment now as a political process, a formal accusation against a president or officeholder. In this era it meant something rawer and more personal: one criminal informing on another to save his own skin. To be impeached by a companion was to be betrayed from within.
Passenger: in modern usage a passenger is someone riding in a vehicle, but in early eighteenth-century English it simply meant a person passing by on foot. The victims of Whittingham’s gang were ordinary pedestrians walking London’s broad streets.
Condemned hold: this was the section of Newgate Prison where those sentenced to death were confined in their final days. It sat deep in the building, dark and airless, and the condemned could hear other prisoners beneath them through cracks in the floor; a last cruelty layered on top of all the others.
Dissolution: today the word carries a formal, almost bureaucratic tone; the dissolution of a company or a parliament. In this context it means death itself: the dissolving of body from soul. It was the polite, prayerful way of naming the thing that waited at Tyburn.
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.
