John Dykes cannot stop gambling. It is this single compulsion; documented in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; that drags a young man from indulged eldest son to pickpocket to something far worse, tracing the kind of spiral that still defines true crime centuries later.
Born to parents of middling means who sacrifice their own comfort for his education, Dykes refuses every apprenticeship, every honest path set before him. Instead he haunts the gaming tables when flush and plays span-farthing in the gutter with street boys when broke, each loss pushing him one step closer to the road.
The dice keep rolling, and Georgian London keeps score in ways a young man rarely sees until the ledger is already closed.
Hear the full account read aloud from Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; a voice from nearly three hundred years ago, waiting for you now.
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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.
Gaming: today we might picture video games; in the eighteenth century this word meant gambling and nothing else. Dice, cards, hazard tables: the kind of play that devours money and then devours the player. When the text says Dykes had an ‘itching after gaming,’ it means he was addicted to wagering, not to innocent amusement.
Chuck and span-farthing: these were street games played for small stakes, often by children and the desperately poor. Chuck involved pitching coins at a mark, while span-farthing required tossing a farthing close enough to an opponent’s coin to span the gap with your hand. That Dykes stoops to these games in a ragged coat tells you exactly how far a night at the tables has brought him down.
Bridewell: not a single prison but a type of institution; originally the Bridewell Palace near Fleet Street was converted into a house of correction in the sixteenth century, and the name became shorthand for any local lockup where petty offenders were held and put to hard labour. Tothill Fields Bridewell, mentioned here, sat in Westminster and was notorious for its grim conditions.
Horsepond: a pond used for watering horses, but also a place of informal punishment. To be ducked or dragged through the horsepond was a humiliation inflicted on petty criminals and social nuisances. It was not judicial in any formal sense; more a community ritual of degradation.
Swore upon: to be ‘swore upon’ meant to have someone give sworn testimony against you before a magistrate. When West tells his brother he is in danger of being swore upon by coiners, he is claiming that counterfeiters are about to name him as an accomplice under oath; a terrifying prospect in an era when such testimony could lead swiftly to the gallows.
To recruit: in modern usage, to recruit means to enlist people. In the eighteenth century it also meant to replenish or restore something that had been depleted. When the text says Dykes took to the road ‘to recruit’ his cash, it means he robbed travellers to refill his empty purse.
Took up with the road: a euphemism for becoming a highwayman. To ‘take the road’ was to ride out on public highways and rob travellers at gunpoint. The phrase sounds almost casual, as if it were simply another career option; and for men like Dykes, that was precisely how it felt until the law caught up.
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.
