• 1 There are essays on all three groups in Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society (...)
• 2 Reported in the Morning Post, 7 May 1828.

2Both in high art and in popular culture, there is a touch of glamour attached to rural criminals and outlaws, which conflicts with the nineteenth-century desire to quell popular unrest and establish the rule of law. Robin Hood, Dick Turpin the highwayman, and Rob Roy were well-known popular heroes. While legislators and moralists tried to stamp out deviant practices, art, literature and drama tended to undermine these efforts by romanticizing the outlaw. Smugglers, poachers and wreckers shared in some of that romantic aura. These activities have many things in common.1 They took place in the country, were carried out mostly by groups of men, often under the cover of darkness; they required bravery and, in the case of smugglers, seamanship; their legal and moral status was ambiguous, depending on laws which many saw as unjust; they were practised by the poor as a means of subsistence. Almost invariably, it seems, poachers, smugglers and wreckers were not seen as criminal within their own communities, making the practices very difficult to police. The better-off sections of society benefited from poaching and smuggling, consuming poached game at inns, or buying contraband spirits at a reduced price. Involvement in poaching or smuggling potentially developed skills which were needed for the defence of the country—brave men who could shoot rabbits (or keepers) in the dark would be useful recruits for the army, while the daring and the seamanship required to be a successful smuggler were equally valuable for the manning of the navy. But, on the negative side, they could lead to worse crimes, including murder, and raised the spectre of riot and revolution. They were associated with idleness, and seen as an easy way to make a living which diverted the poor from the industrious habits needed to build a modern society. As the Marquis of Lansdowne said, in a debate in the House of Lords in 1828 ‘there could be no doubt that poaching was the initiation for other crime—that it accustomed the lower orders of the people to midnight adventures, and to habits the most remote from regular, and wholesome industry.’2 These words must have seemed prophetic when, two years later, rural labourers did indeed engage in ‘midnight adventures’, burning corn ricks all over southern England in the ‘Swing’ riots.

• 3 J. G. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 1899, vol. I, 357, 362.
• 4 P. G. Munsche 167.

3Representations of poachers in art are often didactic in approach. The tone was set by a series of six paintings by Edward Bird, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1813, which showed a poacher taking game in moonlight, disposing of it to the guard of a mail-coach, coming home to his wife who has been sitting up all night waiting for him, being committed by the magistrate, and finally ‘released from his imprisonment, during which he has been attended through a severe fit of illness by his amiable wife, whose kind attention, aided by the seasonable interference of a good clergyman, has brought about a determination to amend his conduct.’ This passage was printed in the Academy catalogue, just in case anyone should miss the moral lesson of the series. James Campbell’s painting The Wife’s Remonstrance (fig. 1) dates from the 1850s, when the Game Laws had been reformed and opinion was much more sympathetic to the poacher, yet he still depicts the poacher as someone who is furtive and ashamed of his wrongdoing, conscious of the effects of his ‘crime’ on family life. This painting was for a long time thought to be by John Everett Millais, who records working on a picture entitled ‘The Poacher’s Wife’ in September 1860 (after a month’s shooting on a friend’s estate in Scotland).3 Poaching was very much a class issue—in the debates over the Game Laws both sides saw the central issue as being the power of the landed gentry.4 Artists could not afford to offend this group of people, who remained a major source of potential patronage (and in Millais’s case also made up the greater part of his social circle).

• 5 For the Mulready, see K. M. Heleniak, William Mulready (New Haven and London: Yale University Press (...)

4Other artists, too, stressed the disadvantages of poaching. In 1828, the year of a Night Poaching Act which was intended to deal with the problem of the poaching gangs, of 50 or 60 strong, who had been terrorising the country and causing violent affrays in which poachers and gamekeepers had been killed, William Mulready exhibited Interior of an English Cottage. This shows a gamekeeper’s wife, who has been waiting up all night, hoping for her husband’s safe return from his highly dangerous occupation. In 1831, the year of the Reform of the Game Laws, Sir Edwin Landseer exhibited three paintings of Highland poachers, one of which, The Poacher’s Bothy, shows a poacher disembowelling a deer while furtively looking towards a door or window in fear of discovery. At the same Royal Academy exhibition, he showed a painting of a ghillie, or hunter’s attendant, enjoying the fruits of legal hunting, in a well-kept domestic interior complete with dutiful wife and daughter. Landseer was another artist whose fortunes were inextricably linked to the social system supported by the Game Laws: he was patronised by the aristocracy and was himself keen on hunting. Mulready’s painting was bought by King George IV for the Royal Collection.5

• 6 Athenaeum (1837) 219.
• 7 H. Hopkins, 212–27.
• 8 Both are illustrated in C. Payne, Rustic Simplicity: Scenes of Cottage Life in Nineteenth-Century B (...)

5The artistic tradition of contrasting industry and idleness, begun by Hogarth in his series of prints illustrating the lives of the idle and industrious apprentice, was adapted for pictures of poachers. An early example is a pair of paintings, now lost, by Edward Prentis, shown in 1837 and described by a reviewer as ‘Fruits of Idleness—a wounded poacher with his terrified family—and Fruits of Industry, a cottage dinner’, which made this message very clear.6 Poaching continued to be a problem after 1837, and the issue was kept topical by a Select Committee in 1846 and cartoons in Punch which were generally sympathetic towards the poacher.7 The Pre-Raphaelites and their followers were usually on the side of the poor in their attitudes to social issues, yet their paintings of poachers continue the didactic theme, contrasting the desperate poacher with his gentle, law-abiding wife and his suffering children, as in Campbell’s painting. Another associate of the Pre-Raphaelites was Thomas Wade, who exhibited two paintings in 1868, The Poacher’s Home and A Stitch in Time: they are not a pair (they are different sizes and shapes) but they do seem to present a contrast between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ labourer, similar to that made in the lost paintings by Prentis. A Stitch in Time shows husband and wife co-operating in weaving: their industriousness means that their daughter is well-clothed and free to play with her doll. In The Poacher’s Home, by contrast, the shabbily-dressed children have to work, there is no wife, and the poacher himself is unable to relax with his pipe, but looks anxiously towards the door as if in fear of discovery. In all these paintings, the implication is that the poacher is a weak character, suffering fear and shame.8

• 9 See, for example, ‘Smugglers and Poachers’, Book XXI of Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall, 1819.
• 10 The legal position is summed up in J. G. Rule 177–78.

6On the coast, a parallel to poaching was the practice of smuggling, which often went hand-in-hand with wrecking. Smuggling was especially similar to poaching, in that it was a crime created by laws which many felt were too harsh; the same people might be both smugglers and poachers, and they are often associated in literature, for example in the poetry of George Crabbe.9 Wrecking was the practice of plundering goods and material from a wreck on the shore. Legally, this was the property of the Crown unless the owner claimed it within a year and a day—but in the absence of representatives of the Crown all around the coast, this was extremely difficult to enforce, and the custom grew up of allowing groups of local people to take what they could before the sea swept it away. As with poaching, the opponents of wrecking pointed out that it led to worse crimes: wreckers might be tempted to use false lights to guide a ship on to the rocks, to ignore the cries of the shipwrecked in their eagerness to salvage the cargo, even to kill any survivors of the wreck, as this would make it less likely that their ownership of recovered material would be challenged.10

• 11 Eric Shanes, Turner’s Rivers, Harbours and Coasts (London: Book Club Associates, 1981) 28, 33, 48. (...)

7Both smuggling and wrecking feature in J. M. W. Turner’s watercolours of the coast, executed for a variety of engraved publications. Three of these, from the early 1820s, dramatise the activities involved in smuggling in barrels of gin from France, based on a visit he made to Folkestone in 1821. In Folkestone from the Sea the crew of a French boat transfer barrels of gin to a local boat, from which they are tied to a heavily-weighted sinking rope, and thus lowered to the bottom of the sea to be retrieved later on. A revenue cutter approaches from the right, making it imperative that the operation is completed quickly. Twilight—Smugglers off Folkestone fishing up smuggled gin (1824) shows the sequel: the smugglers, looking around anxiously in case they are observed, pull up the barrels, still tied to their rope, from the sea bed. Finally, Folkestone, Kent (c. 1822) shows smugglers burying barrels, which they have brought up the cliffs. Eric Shanes believes that Turner’s knowledge of the techniques involved in smuggling is so detailed that he may well have gone out at night with the smugglers on his visit to Folkestone.11 There is little hint here of any disapproval of the smugglers—the implication is that theirs is a coastal activity like any other, involving hard work and knowledge of the sea and boats.

• 12 Illustrated in Eric Shanes nos 28 and 36.
• 13 In 1825 John Robeson published a bitter denunciation of Cornish wreckers in the English Chronicle: (...)

8Turner also depicts wreckers in the foregrounds of his coastal scenes. In fact, they are so common in his work that his figures more often seem to be harvesting wreck from the sea than fish. In an early watercolour, Pendennis Castle: Scene after a Wreck (1816) he shows how dangerous the practice could be if a ship had foundered, as was often the case, off a rocky part of the coast: the figures are hauling part of the mast of the ship up a steep cliff while the waves crash and swirl beneath them. More often he shows material being removed from a wreck on a beach, as in Margate (c. 1822).12 Unlike smuggling and poaching, this kind of wrecking has the appearance of a community activity, with women and even children being involved. Again, there is no hint that the viewer is being encouraged to disapprove of the wreckers, or to connect these peaceful people with the dreadful stories of murder and callous disregard for human life that were published in the newspapers of the time, one of which, in 1825, described wreckers as ‘human vultures who wait their evening prey.’13

• 14 On this painting, see James Hamilton, Turner and the Scientists (Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998) 83– (...)

9When he used wreckers for the theme of a large oil painting, Wreckers, Coast of Northumberland, with a Steamboat assisting a Ship off Shore (1834, fig. 2), Turner took a more judgmental approach to the theme. The wreckers pull a mast out of the sea in the foreground: a woman takes a leading role in the struggle. In the background, however, a ship is in distress, and Turner’s title makes it clear that a steamboat is offering assistance. It seems that there is also another group on shore helping this boat. The painting, therefore, clearly contrasts those who act on concern for their fellow-creatures with those who are only activated by greed. Colour symbolism underlines the lesson: the good steamboat is outlined in white, the colours used for the wreckers are dark, almost black.14 This kind of contrast was often deployed in the arguments against wrecking. In a novel, The Wreckers, first published in 1857, Rosa Mackenzie Kettle describes dramatic shipwrecks, which divide the populace into rescuers on the one hand, and wreckers on the other:

• 15 Rosa Mackenzie Kettle, The Wreckers, 1857 (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1880) 347, 312. The same author (...)

10In this novel, modernisation, in the shape of a lighthouse, both reduces the incidence of shipwreck and humanises the peasantry, who are ‘induced [...] to seek for gain by more honest means.’15 As with poaching and smuggling, wrecking is seen as dangerous because it offers easy rewards—an alternative to ‘regular, and wholesome industry’.

• 16 R. Ayton and W. Daniell, A Voyage Round Great Britain, Undertaken between the years 1813 and 1823 a (...)
• 17 R. Ayton and W. Daniell, vol. II, 16–17.
• 18 Stanfield’s Coast Scenery: The British Channel (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1836, repr. Manchester: (...)
• 19 John Rattenbury, Memoirs of a Smuggler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: V. Graham, 1837) 46.

11Commentaries in engraved publications of the early nineteenth century convey a tolerant view of wrecking and smuggling which is similar to that expressed in Turner’s watercolours. Richard Ayton, in his commentary on the first volume of William Daniell’s Voyage Round Great Britain (begun in 1813) records his conversations with the inhabitants of Combe Martin, in Devon, who, having first ‘reverted with pride to those days when a little honest smuggling cheered a man’s heart with a drop of unadulterated gin’, indicate that they see nothing morally wrong in plundering a wreck: ‘they talk of a good wreck-season as they do of a good mackerel-season, and thank providence for both.’16 Daniell himself, in his commentary to Volume VII (1824), on the south-east coast, notes that ‘smuggling was formerly carried on here to a great extent, being partly connived at for the sake of its tendency to maintain a hardy race of seamen on the coast; but it received a great check from Mr Pitt’s bills for the prevention of illicit trade, and has been further curtailed by the efficient measures recently taken to enforce these salutary enactments.’17 This last comment is ambivalent—Daniell endorses the setting up of the Coast Blockade, intended to combat smuggling, as a salutary enactment, but his comment on the tendency of smuggling to maintain a hardy race of seamen suggests positive approval for the practice. In Clarkson Stanfield’s Coast Scenery (1837), smugglers are described even more favourably as ‘gentle sons of the ocean, ever anxious that His Majesty’s subjects should be well-provided, even if His Majesty’s Exchequer should suffer for it’. They are ‘rogues, who love the illicit’, but ‘the love of romance and adventure dwells with sailors, and pity it is that a revenue cutter should ever interfere to destroy the romantic.’18 1837 was also the year of publication of John Rattenbury’s Memoirs of a Smuggler, produced with the help of Lord Rolle and subtitled ‘the Rob Roy of the West’, which is overwhelmingly positive about smuggling. Rattenbury presents it as a trade like any other, and one ‘calculated to gratify a hardy and enterprising spirit, and to call forth all the latent energies of the soul.’19 By this time, smuggling was much less prevalent, thanks to the Coast Blockade, and Peel’s Free Trade budgets of the early 1840s further accelerated its decline.

• 20 On this painting, see F. Irwin, ‘Wilkie at the Cross Roads’, Burlington Magazine 116. 853 (April 19 (...)
• 21 For example, G. P. R. James, Esq., The Smuggler: A Tale (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1845) vii.

12One might surmise that the engraved publications, aimed at a wide market, espouse a slightly subversive sympathy for the smuggler which was not likely to be so acceptable in works exhibited at the Royal Academy. However, a number of painters produced pictures of smugglers which represent them as brave, proud and heroic. In 1824 Sir Robert Peel himself commissioned a painting by David Wilkie, entitled Smugglers offering run goods for sale or concealment (fig. 3), which was shown at the Royal Academy in that year and subsequently engraved.20 This was based on studies from actual smugglers (Peel, as Home Secretary, was able to get Wilkie into Newgate prison to make sketches of a group of foreign smugglers who had recently been apprehended). The smuggler in this composition looks alarming, but also strong and proud—his stance is very different from the guilty, uncomfortable demeanour usually attributed by artists to the poacher. A Newcastle painter, Henry Perlee Parker, made a speciality of this ‘romantic’ subject, producing paintings from the 1820s to the 1860s which depict fights on the rough sea between smugglers and soldiers, but also peaceful domestic scenes of smugglers playing cards, sitting around on barrels which presumably hold their illicit booty. Another painter from the North-East, Thomas Sword Good, depicts smugglers with their families, looking healthy and happy as they enjoy the fruits of their occupation. Writings on smugglers in the mid-nineteenth century often describe them as ‘free traders’21: they could be seen, therefore, not merely as relics of the past but as forward-looking exponents of the system that was widely seen as the best hope for prosperity in the future.

• 22 Photo: Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art.
• 23 A. Greg, Charles Napier Hemy, R. A. (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Laing Art Gallery, 1984) 50–51, quoting l (...)

13Wreckers are less common than smugglers as a theme in nineteenth-century art and literature, but a number of painters followed Turner’s example in using wrecked boats and figures to animate dramatic coastal landscapes. Edward Duncan, a watercolourist who was active in the middle years of the century, often depicts wreckers, but he equally made a speciality of scenes showing lifeboats and rescues. In his Holy Island, Northumberland (1870), the figures swarm like ants over the wrecked ship, whose exposed ribs give it the appearance of a dead animal.22 A scene like this, with ancient buildings in the background, and an old-fashioned wooden ship in the foreground, suggests a practice that belongs to the past. At the end of the century, Charles Napier Hemy, who was based at Falmouth, painted two large works on the theme of wrecking. For the first of these, in 1898, he found a wreck at the foot of the cliffs at Land’s End, and got 24 local men to pose for studies. He wanted to entitle the painting ‘The Wreckers’ but considered that his subjects might be offended, so he changed the title to Wreckage. Such sensitivity seems to have been abandoned three years later, however, when he exhibited a painting with a much more explicit title: Birds of Prey (1901), which shows wreckers at work on the rocks while a ship appears in the distance.23 In the first painting, the wreckers look strong, determined and well-disciplined; but in the second Hemy seems to have reverted to the mythology of the wrecker as human vulture.