John Meff is the son of French Protestant refugees who fled persecution under Louis XIV, raised in London with great care and bound apprentice to a weaver. He serves faithfully, marries, and then finds himself unable to keep his family alive on honest wages; it is poverty, not wickedness, that first pushes him toward housebreaking, a trajectory recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals with the unsentimental clarity that makes it one of the earliest works of true crime writing we possess.
What follows is a life of compounding misfortune: narrow escapes, broken resolutions, and a restless drift across oceans that never quite carries Meff far enough from the world he is trying to leave behind. His story belongs to a London where the line between desperation and damnation is thinner than anyone cares to admit.
Every road Meff walks seems to curve back toward the same dark gravity, and the law of Georgian England is not a patient institution. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals holds the full account; hear it now, read aloud in all its grim detail.
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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.
Transported: in modern usage this word simply means moved from one place to another, but in eighteenth century criminal law it carried a very specific and dreaded meaning. To be transported was to be shipped to the colonies as punishment, forced into years of hard labour far from home. It was considered a mercy compared to hanging, though those who endured it might have disagreed.
Marooned: today this word is used loosely to mean stranded anywhere, but its origin is steeped in pirate custom. To be marooned was to be deliberately abandoned on an uninhabited island, usually with little or no provisions; it was a death sentence disguised as exile, a punishment pirates inflicted on those who refused to join their crew or who broke their code.
Springes: a word now almost entirely extinct. A springe was a snare or trap for catching birds and small animals, typically made from a loop of cord or wire attached to a bent branch. In this account, the castaways fashion them from the horsehair of an old wig; desperation breeds invention.
Fluxes: in the eighteenth century a flux was a violent and often fatal bout of diarrhoea or dysentery, the kind of illness that could reduce a strong person to helplessness within days. The word had an urgency to it that its modern medical equivalents have lost; aboard ships and on desolate islands, flux killed as readily as fever.
Ill-courses: a polite eighteenth century way of saying a life of crime. The phrase carried a note of moral judgement baked right into it; one did not simply commit crimes, one ‘addicted’ oneself to ill-courses, as though lawbreaking were a sickness of the will.
Impeached: today impeachment belongs almost entirely to political language, but in this period it meant something closer to informing on or betraying one’s accomplices to the authorities. To impeach a fellow criminal was to give evidence against them in exchange for one’s own life; a survival tactic with a very short shelf life.
Act of Indemnity: a parliamentary pardon extended to certain classes of offenders, wiping the slate clean for specific crimes committed before a given date. These acts were political tools as much as legal ones, and whether a particular criminal fell within their scope could be a matter of life and death; in Meff’s case, the question is raised at trial with everything hanging in the balance.
Put in the cart: the condemned were loaded into an open cart and paraded through the streets to the place of execution. The phrase sounds almost mundane, but for the person sitting in that cart, surrounded by crowds, it was the last journey they would ever take.
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.