Prices in AUD. Shipping worldwide. Flat rate $8 postage per order within Australia. International by weight calculated at checkout. Read full terms.
-
Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey, for Murder, Robberies, Rapes, Sodomy, Coining, Frauds, Bigamy, and other Offences.
No author
London: John Applebee for George Strahan, et al., 1742.To which are added, Genuine Accounts of the Lives, Behaviour, Confessions and Dying Speeches of the most eminent Convicts. Rare complete set of this collection of 18th century British crimes with explicit descriptions of crimes, trials, and punishments. Therein are numerous accounts of sodomy including that the case of one of the most famous of London’s gay meeting spots of the time, Clap’s molly house, being the coffee house of Margaret Clap AKA Mother Clap. “Margaret Clap, for keeping a Sodomitical House, July, 1726. MARGARET CLAP was indicted for keeping a disorderly house, in which she procured and encouraged Persons to commit Sodomy, December 10, 1725, and before and after. Samuel Stevens. On Sunday Night, the 14th of November last, I went ot the Prisoner’s House in Field-lane, in Holburn, where I found between 40 and 50 Men making Love to one another, as they call’d it. Sometimes they would sit in one another’s Laps, kissing in a lewd Manner and using their Hand indecently. Then they would get up, Dance and make Curtsies, and mimick the Voices of Women. ‘ I, Fie, Sir ! – Pray, Sir, – Dear, Sir, – Lord, how can you serve me so? – I swear I’ll cry out. – You’re a wicked Devil, – and your’e a bold Face. – Eh ! ye little dear Toad ! Come, buss ! -‘ Then they’d hug, and play, and toy, and go out by Couples into another Room on the same Floor, to be married, as they call’d it…” (vol. III, pp. 37) and so on and so forth are similar and many other crimes told, such as the murderer Sarah Malcolm (who was sketched by Hogarth), Catherine Hayes and her accomplices, the murderer poet Richard Savage (as described in Samuel Johnson’s Life of Savage), the thief John Jack Sheppard, and the sodomy trial of Charles Hitchen.