John Thomson grows up in London among dishonest company, learning the taste of easy money before he ever learns a trade. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals records how this weaver’s apprentice abandons his loom for the sea, where years of plunder and bloodshed remake him into something harder than the boy who left the shore.
When Thomson finally returns to land, the violence he has absorbed does not stay at sea. His story is the kind of true crime account that reveals how a man’s character can curdle slowly, shaped by poverty, restlessness, and the grim education of wartime waters.
The streets of Georgian London wait for men like Thomson; and the law waits too. Hear the full account now, drawn directly from the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, and listen as the past speaks 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.
Listed himself: today we might say ‘enlisted,’ but in the early eighteenth century the word was simply ‘listed.’ It meant signing up for military or naval service, often on impulse, and it carried a weight of finality; once listed, you belonged to the Crown.
Man-of-war: not a warrior but a warship. A man-of-war was a vessel built and armed for combat, crewed by pressed or volunteered sailors who lived in conditions brutal enough to make a London slum look comfortable. Thomson served aboard one and came home changed.
Prizes: in naval usage, a prize was an enemy ship captured during wartime along with its cargo. Seizing prizes was legal plunder; crews received shares of the spoils, and a good cruise could make a common sailor rich. The word carried none of the innocent connotation it holds today; it smelled of gunpowder and salt water.
Persons of no substance: this did not mean they lacked personality. Substance here means material wealth and social standing. Thomson’s parents were poor, without property or reputation, and the phrase carried a quiet judgment: people of no substance were people who could not be trusted to raise a child properly.
Creditable method of life: a way of living that earned you credit in the eyes of society; respectable, honest, worthy of trust. Thomson’s shipmates managed it. Thomson did not.
Debauched: the word still exists, but in the eighteenth century it carried heavier moral freight. To live a debauched life meant not merely to drink too much but to have been thoroughly corrupted; turned away from all discipline, all order, all decency. Thomson’s chronicler uses it to describe a boy who had never so much as opened a Bible.
Fact: today a fact is a piece of verified truth. In Georgian legal language, a fact was a deed; specifically, a criminal deed. When the text says Thomson was ‘apprehended soon after this fact,’ it means he was caught shortly after committing the crime itself.
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.
