The Steal Read Online Free Page A

it—“garbage” in the trade—and pass it out the window, where a third thief, whom the second pretends to engage in conversation, is strolling by.
    “Sir, a word with you. I have a message to do unto you from a very friend of yours, and the errand is of some importance.”
    If caught, Greene advised, the three thieves should swear innocence and “call for revenge” against those who accused them.
    Although these lifters were men, Greene anticipated centuries of women dominating the theft when, in yet another pamphlet, he wrote, “Women are more subtile than the cunningest . . . lift.” If “starring the glaze”—slang for breaking glass shop windows with a diamond, nail, or knife—was men’s work, lifting was a female crime. Lifting suggested illicit sex and the shame that it incited. “So young and so old a lifter,” Cressida jokes about Troilus, punning on “limb-lifter,” slang for having sex with a prostitute against a wall.
    The word “shoplift” first appeared in the tsunami of pulpy biographies, novels, and guides to criminal haunts printed at the end of the seventeenth century. One picaresque tale depicted the underworld setting that shoplifters prowled through. “Towards Night these Houses are throng’d with People of all sorts and qualities . . . Lifters, Foilers, Bulkers”—the reader is dragged on an anthropological tour of the city’s nightspots. The Ladies Dictionary , in addition to providing tips on losing weight and fixing hair, described the female shoplifter who might “go into a mercer’s shop and there pretend to lay out a great deal of Money; Whereas her whole intent is to convey into her nap a piece of some silk or satin that she may the better facilitate her purpose.” Another manual to the criminal element helpfully portrayed this shoplifter as “commonly well clad.”
    Beneath the shoplifters’ fancy clothes lay prostitutes, bounders, con artists, female pimps, and actresses. Mary Frith, aka Moll Cut-Purse, procured, shoplifted, and picked pockets. An anonymously written pamphlet attributed her stealing to her “being born under Mercury.” But The Newgate Calendar , a short, weekly biographical pamphlet about the lives of executed criminals, offered another explanation: Moll stole because she “was so ugly in any dress as never to be wooed nor solicited by any man.” Nor, The Newgate Calendar added, did this androgyne ever have her period or fall in love. Another Moll, sometime prostitute Moll King, shoplifted to dress better, or maybe to attract better clients. She stole a red petticoat (part of the prostitute’s uniform), Flanders lace, and a hair fringe, the front piece of one of the enormous powdered wigs that conferred status on men and women.
    Lady shoplifters, sometimes called Amazons or roaring girls, wore pants to pass as men in the underworld and to more easily rob the drunks and scoundrels whose rooms they shared at notorious lodging houses. Diarist Samuel Pepys dwelled for several entries on Maria Carlston. Also called the German Princess, or Mary or Maria Carleton, Carlston performed in a play about her own larcenous adventures. As Mary Blacke, she shoplifted before she was executed.
    In the century since Robert Greene’s guide was printed, London had doubled in size, becoming the largest and wealthiest city in the world. Londoners scrutinized clothes; the luxury-goods business exploded. A partial inventory of a mercer’s shop might include silks and brocades, cloth of silver and gold, Genevan and English velvet, satin, mohairs, and crepes. Such shops were crowded—sometimes as many as sixty customers vied for one salesperson’s attention. The shops also established credit, extending the possibilities of what people could buy—if not up front, then by paying usurious interest. Whatever the reasons for the rise in shoplifters, they crimped merchants’ profits.
    By 1699, under William III, Parliament passed a group of laws increasing punishment for