Dick Turpin - Modern View

Modern View

Some of the Turpin legend can be sourced directly to Richard Bayes' The Genuine History of the Life of Richard Turpin (1739), a mixture of fact and fiction hurriedly put together in the wake of the trial, to satisfy a gullible public. The speeches of the condemned, biographies of criminals, and trial literature, were popular genres during the late 17th and early 18th centuries; written for a mass audience and a precursor to the modern novel, they were "produced on a scale which beggars comparison with any period before or since". Such literature functioned as news and a "forum in which anxieties about crime, punishment, sin, salvation, the workings of providence and social and moral transgression generally could be expressed and negotiated."

Bayes' document contains elements of conjecture; for instance, his claim that Turpin was married to a Miss Palmer (and not Elizabeth Millington) is almost certainly incorrect, and the date of Turpin's marriage, for which no documentary evidence has been found, appears to be based solely on Bayes' claim that in 1739 Turpin had married 11 or 12 years earlier. His account of those present during the robberies committed by the Essex Gang often contains names that never appeared in contemporary newspaper reports, suggesting, according to author Derek Barlow, that Bayes embellished his story. Bayes' description of Turpin's relationship with "King the Highwayman" is almost certainly fictional. Turpin may have known Matthew King as early as 1734, and had an active association with him from February 1737, but the story of the "Gentleman Highwayman" may have been created only to link the end of the Essex gang with the author's own recollection of events. Barlow also views the account of the theft of Turpin's corpse, appended to Thomas Kyll's publication of 1739, as "handled with such delicacy as to amount almost to reverence", and therefore of suspect provenance.

No contemporary portrait exists of Turpin, who as a notorious but unremarkable figure was not considered sufficiently important to be immortalised. An engraving in one edition of Bayes' 1739 publication, of a man hiding in a cave, is sometimes supposed to be him, but the closest description that exists is that given by John Wheeler, of "a fresh coloured man, very much marked with the small pox, about five feet nine inches high ... wears a blue grey coat and a light coloured wig". An E-FIT of Turpin, created from such reports, was published by the Castle Museum in York in 2009.

Turpin is best known for his exploits as a highwayman, but before his execution the only contemporary report of him as such was in June 1737, when a broadsheet entitled "News news: great and wonderful news from London in an uproar or a hue and cry after the Great Turpin, with his escape into Ireland" was published. Although some of his contemporaries became the subject of chapbooks, names such as James Hind, Claude Duval and William Nevison, are not nearly as well-known today as the legend of Dick Turpin, whose fictionalised exploits first began to appear around the turn of the 19th century. It was, however, the story of a fabled ride from London to York that provided the impetus for 19th-century author William Harrison Ainsworth to include and embellish the exploit in his 1834 novel Rookwood. Ainsworth used Turpin as a plot device, describing him in a manner that makes him more lively than the book's other characters. Turpin is introduced with the pseudonym Palmer, and is later forced to escape on his horse, Black Bess. Although fast enough to keep ahead of those in pursuit, Black Bess eventually dies under the stress of the journey. This scene appealed more to readers than the rest of the work, and as Turpin was depicted as a likeable character who made the life of a criminal seem appealing, the story came to form part of the modern legend surrounding Turpin. The artist Edward Hull capitalised on Ainsworth's story, publishing six prints of notable events in Turpin's career.

Rash daring was the main feature of Turpin's character. Like our great Nelson, he knew fear only by name; and when he thus trusted himself in the hands of strangers, confident in himself and in his own resources, he felt perfectly easy as to the result Turpin was the ultimus Romanorum, the last of a race, which—we were almost about to say we regret—is now altogether extinct. Several successors he had, it is true, but no name worthy to be recorded after his own. With him expired the chivalrous spirit which animated successively the bosoms of so many knights of the road; with him died away that passionate love of enterprise, that high spirit of devotion to the fair sex, which was first breathed upon the highway by the gay, gallant Claude Du-Val, the Bayard of the road—Le filou sans peur et sans reproche—but which was extinguished at last by the cord that tied the heroic Turpin to the remorseless tree.

Ainsworth's tale of Turpin's overnight journey from London to York on his mare Black Bess has its origins in an episode recorded by Daniel Defoe, in his 1727 work A tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain. After committing a robbery in Kent in 1676, William Nevison apparently rode to York to establish an alibi, and Defoe's account of that journey became part of folk legend. A similar ride was attributed to Turpin as early as 1808, and was being performed on stage by 1819, but the feat as imagined by Ainsworth (about 200 miles in less than a day) is impossible. Nevertheless, Ainsworth's legend of Black Bess was repeated in works such as Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, a 254-part penny dreadful published in 1867–68. In these tales, Turpin was the hero, accompanied by his trusty colleagues Claude Duval, Tom King, and Jack Rann. These narratives, which transformed Turpin from a pockmarked thug and murderer into "a gentleman of the road a protector of the weak", followed a popular cultural tradition of romanticising English criminals. This practice is reflected in the ballads written about Turpin, the earliest of which, Dick Turpin, would appear to have been published in 1737. Later ballads presented Turpin as an 18th-century Robin Hood figure: "Turpin was caught and his trial was passed, and for a game cock he died at last. Five hundred pounds he gave so free, all to Jack Ketch as a small legacy."

Stories about Turpin continued to be published well into the 20th century, and the legend was also transferred to the stage. In 1845 the playwright George Dibdin-Pitt recreated the most notable "facts" of Turpin's life, and in 1846 Marie Tussaud added a wax sculpture of Turpin to her collection at Madame Tussauds. In 1906 actor Fred Ginnett wrote and starred in the film Dick Turpin's Last Ride to York. Other silent versions appeared for the silver screen, and some adaptations even moulded Turpin into a figure styled on Robin Hood. Sid James appeared as Turpin in the 1974 Carry On film, Carry On Dick, and LWT cast Richard O'Sullivan as Turpin in their eponymous series, Dick Turpin.