Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is a true crime podcast unlike any other; because every word of it was written nearly 300 years ago.
Each week, we read aloud one chapter from a remarkable book first published in London in 1735: a sprawling collection of murderers, highwaymen, coiners, housebreakers, pirates and worse, recorded in vivid and unsparing detail.
The crimes are real. The voices are authentic. And the world they reveal, brutal, strange, and surprisingly familiar, has been waiting three centuries to be heard again. True crime did not begin with podcasts. It began here by the burning light of a candle.
Episodes
19 episodes
Episode 018: James Shaw: Highwayman and Murderer of the Hampstead Road
James Shaw is a man who cannot settle. Born into a family with the means to set him on a respectable path, he drifts through one trade after another, never sticking, never satisfied; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures him at the pr...
Episode 017: John Smith: The Soldier Who Pulled the Trigger
John Smith is a man shaped by war; bold, fierce, and trained to violence on the battlefields of Flanders, he returns to civilian life carrying a soldier's instincts into a world that has no place for them. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals...
Episode 016: John Jones: The Young Pickpocket of Holborn
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 t...
Episode 015: Nathaniel Hawes: The Young Highwayman of Finchley Common
Nathaniel Hawes is barely out of his apprenticeship when he begins stealing from his master's cash box, a slow slide from mischief into something far darker. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals presents him as one of those young men who mist...
Episode 014: James Wright: The Weeping Highwayman of the Old Bailey
A respectable wigmaker on the Old Bailey begins to spend faster than he earns, drawn into pleasures he cannot afford and will not abandon. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his slide with quiet precision: James Wright does not tur...
Episode 013: Richard James: The Highwayman of the Oxford Road
Richard James comes into the world already half abandoned: the son of a nobleman's cook, fatherless before he can remember, cast to sea at twelve years old. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts his story, what emerges is a man sha...
Episode 012: John Dykes: The Gambler Turned Highwayman
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 def...
Episode 011: William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park
William Casey is barely out of boyhood when military life delivers him into the world of violence and accusation that defines his story. Enlisted at fifteen into the Guards by his own soldier father, Casey serves in Spain and returns to London ...
Episode 010: John Wigley: The Lone Highwayman of Finchley Common
A plasterer by trade, John Wigley abandons honest work early and slides into what Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals calls 'felonious methods of getting money.' His is a solitary brand of criminality; he rides out alone onto the dark roads ...
Episode 009: John Meff: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away
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...
Episode 008: John Winship: The Young Highwayman of Covent Garden
He is seventeen, an apprentice carpenter in Covent Garden, and he has just noticed a young woman standing in a doorway. In Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, the story of John Winship begins not with violence but with infatuation; a boy wh...
Episode 007: Matthew Clark: The Cowardly Footpad Who Turned Killer
Matthew Clark is the kind of figure who makes true crime so unsettling: not a mastermind, not a hardened villain, but a lazy, cowardly young man whose small vices compound into something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals introdu...
Episode 006: Walter Kennedy: The Aspiring Pirate of Wapping
Walter Kennedy grows up at Pelican Stairs in Wapping, the son of an anchor-smith, a boy with every reason to follow his father into honest labour. But something restless burns in him; as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, he posse...
Episode 005: Barbara Spencer: The Young Coiner of Cripplegate
Barbara Spencer is barely out of childhood when the world begins to shape her into something dangerous. Raised without restraint in the cramped lanes of Cripplegate, she is the kind of figure that Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures...
Episode 004: Robert Perkins: The Disinherited Baker Turned Thief
Robert Perkins grows up in Hertfordshire as the son of a prosperous innkeeper, but prosperity does not protect him. After his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home; stripped of affection, stripped of inherita...
Episode 003: William Barton: The Highwayman Who Could Not Stay Still
William Barton is born with restlessness in his blood. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, his father abandons him as a child, fleeing to Jamaica with a concubine and a hold full of goods; the boy grows up in his grandfather's e...
Episode 002: John Trippuck: The Golden Tinman's Highway Robberies
They call him the Golden Tinman; a man who robs alone and in company, whose scarred body carries the evidence of musket balls extracted from his flesh, and whose notoriety across the roads of early Georgian England is already the stuff of grim ...
Episode 000: Introduction to The Lives Of the Most Remarkable Criminals
This is not a podcast about true crime. It is true crime — written in 1735 and read aloud for the first time in nearly three centuries.Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals was first published in 1735, covering murderers, highwaymen, h...
Episode 001: Jane Griffin: The Mistress Who Turned a Knife on Her Maid
Jane Griffin is a woman of sharp wit, good reputation and a violent temper she cannot govern. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, she keeps a busy inn in Smithfield with her husband, drawing customers with her charm and driving ...