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theft. The Shoplifting Act was one of over 150 laws pertaining to theft passed between 1688 and 1800, creating what historians call the Bloody Code—capital punishment for petty crimes. The Shoplifting Act decreed that shoplifting an item worth more than five shillings could get you hanged. (An alternative since 1660, shoplifters’ transportation to the North American colonies or to Botany Bay was becoming less practical, as those places were increasingly reluctant to accept England’s convicts.) Another part of the law spared those who turned in shoplifters to the police from the duties of serving in public office. William also eliminated “benefit of clergy” for some crimes, including shoplifting items valued over five shillings. (From the fourteenth century, any criminal who could read verse 1 of Psalm 51—the so-called neck verse—from the Bible had escaped with branding on the “meat” of the thumb or, for a few years, on the cheek near the nose instead of transportation or death.)
    The Shoplifting Act did not stop shoplifting. Although the murder rate remained low, shoplifting flared, as did theft generally in London, where most historians agree that it comprised the majority of all crimes. Shoplifting was the third most prevalent offense among transported women.
    Found guilty, a shoplifter might be rushed to Newgate Prison, where, if she could pay the weekly half-crown rent for the “Master’s Side,” she could also fill her apartment with comfortable furniture, carpets, books, wine, and even, in one case, servants. There, while waiting to be tried, hanged, or transported, shoplifters and other well-to-do criminals consorted with radicals such as Lord George Gordon, after whom the 1780 Gordon Riots were named. Sentenced to death, the shoplifter might go to the Tyburn Tree, a gallows built in the Middle Ages on the site of what is now Marble Arch in Hyde Park—today one of London’s busiest shopping areas. The Tyburn Tree was shaped like a long triangle and supported by three legs, so that the cart from Newgate could be backed directly up to the gallows and groups of criminals could be hanged at once. Thousands of people watched. During the eighteenth century, two-thirds of all executions were for property crimes. Not every shoplifter did the “Tyburn jig,” and some merchants protested the Shoplifting Act’s severity. By the 1720s, when London’s population was 700,000, by one estimate, 10,000 thieves called the city home.
    Among the first printed books were biographies of thieves. In these books and in eighteenth-century court records, shoplifters were young, unmarried women fleeing villages and towns (although at least one, Mary Robinson, was a senior citizen) for London. They were anonymous, desirable, available. They also shoplifted differently from men. Whereas men wore cloaks (or went without and used teams), women depended on the pocket, a recent innovation initially designed to protect female shoppers against “purse cutting,” a form of pickpocketing. Since the pocket hung freely under the skirt and on top of the hoop, and could be reached through slits in the cloak, shoplifters used it to stash rolls of “Holland,” as linen was called. When women were caught shoplifting, they fainted, or tried to sell the merchant stolen fabric, or as a last resort, staged a fight.
    Yet for all her popularity, the shoplifter might never have become illustrative of the era if Daniel Defoe had not made her the heroine of the first modern English novel. Published in 1722, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders , supposedly set forty years earlier, traces the rise of Moll, beginning with her mother, who began her life of thievery thanks to “the devil, who began, by the help of an irresistible poverty” as she described it, “even when my necessities were not so great.” Written from Moll’s point of view at age seventy, Moll Flanders is supposedly based on the life of Moll King. The