John Jones is barely a man when he stumbles into the trade that will define him. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts, he is a boy raised with too much tenderness and too little discipline; a creature of idleness born in Holborn to parents who indulge every whim, hoping the flaws will simply fall away with age.
They never do. Refused by every honest trade and cut off by his own family, Jones drifts into a London underworld where true crime begins not with malice but with boredom, poverty, and the wrong friend met at the wrong hour.
The city he moves through is dense with bodies and opportunity, and the distance between a restless young man and a condemned one is terrifyingly short.
Hear his story read aloud from the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; the full chapter awaits 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.
Malefactor: today this word survives mainly in legal documents and old novels, sounding almost quaint. In the eighteenth century it carried real weight; it simply meant a criminal, an evildoer, someone who had done wrong in the eyes of the law. When the text calls Jones a malefactor, it is not decorating him with drama; it is classifying him the way a court clerk would.
Put him out upon liking: this phrase describes a trial arrangement where a young person was placed with a tradesman on a probationary basis before formal apprenticeship papers were signed. Think of it as a working interview that could last weeks. If the boy and the master suited each other, an apprenticeship followed; if not, the boy was sent home. Jones, of course, found fault with every one.
Reluctancy: an older form of what we now call reluctance. It meant the same thing; an unwillingness or hesitation. The longer, slightly clumsier version was common in Georgian prose and has since been quietly trimmed by usage.
Blind alehouse: not a pub for the visually impaired. A blind alehouse was a disreputable drinking den, often unlicensed, tucked away in a back lane or cellar where it could operate out of sight of authorities. The word ‘blind’ here means hidden or obscure; the kind of place where criminal business could be discussed without being overheard.
Pocket: in this context, a pocket is not part of a garment but a separate pouch tied around the waist beneath the skirts. Women carried their valuables in these detachable bags, which is why pickpockets and cutpurses targeted them specifically. To ‘whip off her pocket’ meant to cut or snatch this pouch away from her body entirely.
By-alley: a narrow side passage off a main street; what we might now call an alleyway or a back lane. In Georgian London these cramped passages were everywhere, providing escape routes for thieves and cover for all manner of dark transactions.
Capital in its nature: this phrase means the crime carried the death penalty. In the eighteenth century, a staggering number of offences were capital; theft above a certain value, pickpocketing, housebreaking, even shoplifting could send a person to the gallows. The phrase sounds clinical, almost bureaucratic, but what it really says is: this will cost you your life.
Sessions: the regular sittings of a criminal court, particularly the Old Bailey sessions held roughly every six weeks in London. Being ‘condemned at the next sessions’ meant the wheels of justice turned quickly; there was no long wait on death row in the modern sense. Your trial came around with the calendar, and so did your sentence.
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.
