In this episode, we look at seventeenth and eighteenth century celebrity criminals.
Claude Duval’s story is that of a 17th-century highwayman who women love and men fear.
If you like this story and want more information, here are some suggested links:
Wikipedia has a good painting of Claude Duval dancing with a lady on the highway.
Jenny Diver is a cunning 18th-Century pickpocket who will be forever immortalised in The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera, and the song Mack the Knife.
Learn more about this story’s themes with these links:
Hanged in 1741, Jenny Diver was a pickpocket famed for stashing her loot in a fake pregnancy belly. Immortalised in Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’ and ‘Mack the Knife’. The Georgian Underworld has an account of Jenny Diver, and her wonderful ‘cant’ vocabulary, and you can read more about her life and death at Capital Punishment UK.
Notorious thief Jack Sheppard was widely known in the 18th-Century for his daring prison escapes. He inspired the character MacHeath in The Beggar’s Opera, The Threepenny Opera, and he’s the Mack of the song Mack the Knife.
If you want to delve deeper into this subject, you could try here:
You can find Jack’s portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
