The Original Gentleman Thief

 The first Australian celebrity, George Barrington (1755?–1804) harnessed the power of illusion to appear respectable and thus further his criminal career as a genteel pickpocket. It was a career that in the end was curtailed by the illusions of others seeking to exploit his notoriety, with Barrington himself obliged to reinvent himself as a senior colonial police officer in New South Wales.

Though a neglected figure now, Barrington was one of the most famous people in late eighteenth-century Britain, and his fame had what publicists these days refer to as “the long tail”.

Nearly a century after his arrival at Port Jackson from London on a convict ship in 1791, Marcus Clarke wrote that “Most people have heard of George Barrington, the pickpocket. His name has become notorious—I had almost written famous—for gentlemanly larceny.”

Edgar Allan Poe regarded Barrington as the prime example of the amorality of genius, and wrote that he had greater respect for Barrington’s feats as a thief than he had for what Wordsworth achieved as a poet. (Perhaps only an eccentric literary genius could make such a bizarre comparison.)

But Barrington was not just some sort of criminal mastermind, a Fagin precursor. He was a self-created man, a denizen of the underworld who could move easily among that exclusive section of society in which reposed the greatest wealth and privilege.

There have always been social imposters—witness the party-crashers who somehow made it uninvited into the White House last year—but in the context of the eighteenth century this was a truly remarkable transformation, and one which gave Barrington access to plunder beyond the aspirations of most ordinary criminals. It also accounts for the public fascination with Barrington.

Gentlemen thieves are not uncommon in popular culture, encompassing Raffles and the cat burglar character played by Cary Grant in the Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief, but in Barrington’s time this phenomenon was something new. Barrington was the original gentleman thief.

The press displayed a similar attitude towards Barrington as that of the media today in relation to the more notorious celebrities: a mixture of censoriousness and delight. Substantial coverage was given to his pickpocketing apparatus, consisting of specially made tools, diagrams of which were provided to readers. Such was his fame that souvenirs soon appeared, including earthenware mugs illustrated with Barrington picking a pocket or two. His career quickly became the subject of popular fiction, ballads and melodrama; his portrait was painted by leading artist Sir William Beechey, whose subjects included King George III and Lord Nelson.

The first and most obvious example of illusion used by Barrington was his appearance. So much of our willingness to believe someone and to trust them is based on how they look and whether or not we find them attractive. Indeed in Barrington’s time there were serious attempts made to turn physiognomy—judging people by their appearance—into a legitimate science.

The nagging suspicion that how we look determines who we are has never gone away. Your face is your fortune, the saying goes, and there has probably been no better looking, better dressed or better mannered pickpocket in the history of crime than George Barrington. So often he escaped detection or secured an acquittal because the people he stole from or the juries he appeared before thought he did not look like a criminal.

Barrington added to the illusion of respectability with his acting skills. When he ran away from school as a teenager in Ireland, Barrington fell in with a travelling company of actors who also happened to be a gang of thieves. Barrington learned how to pick pockets at the same time as he played the leading man in tragedies and romantic melodramas.

We may tend to associate the late eighteenth century with satire but in popular culture very largely it was an age of sentiment. The persona Barrington developed was that of a “man of feeling”, a phrase that is also the title of one of the most popular novels of the era. The man of feeling was an idealised thoughtful and sympathetic male character, what we might call a SNAG.

The man of feeling was not only a figure fastidious, refined and effete—not attributes usually ascribed to members of the criminal class in the days before white-collar crime—but he was also a man who cried. Indeed, it was widely believed that crying was involuntary and manifested a genuine outpouring of emotion. So Barrington cried when challenged in the street by people whose property was missing and he wept in front of juries at his trials.

Today we are moved—or are we?—by displays of emotion, from politicians and other public figures. In his addresses to juries, Barrington not only became lachrymose, but pleaded that he was a victim of mistaken identity and therefore injustice, thus pushing the sympathy button to which con artists and hoaxers have always resorted in their efforts to deceive us. Nothing makes us uncritical more effectively than a direct appeal to our emotions. It has been said that “The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made.” Another way of putting it might be to say that spontaneity has the greatest impact when it is carefully contrived.

Barrington did everything possible to appear as someone other than a typical criminal, and he used illusion also in his criminal practice. Partly this was the simple matter of his choice of work attire. While on the run or “on assignment” throughout Britain and Ireland, Barrington adopted a range of suitably respectable disguises such as priest, doctor and lawyer.

As a pickpocket, Barrington was also skilled in creating cognitive illusions that enabled him and his associates to steal from people without the victims even realising they were being robbed. Creating distractions while the act of theft is taking place is an essential part of pickpocketing, whether in the criminal sphere or among magicians who specialise in what is known as theatrical pickpocketing. Misdirection is the term generally applied to the cognitive illusions magicians and illusionists use to persuade us to see things that aren’t there or not see things that are there.

Typically in Barrington’s time a pickpocket would use an accomplice to create a diversion or act as a decoy or receiver of the goods. The most basic techniques were passed down the centuries long before scientists began examining how our perception is altered by appearance and by emotion, and also by certain movements of the body. Back in the heyday of alchemy, science was the same thing as magic. Today scientists are looking anew at how magic tricks are performed in order to better understand the limits of cognition and attention.

The uses to which Barrington put illusion in turn added to the illusion of Barrington himself. When Barrington disembarked at Port Jackson in 1791, he found his reputation as a celebrity criminal had preceded him. Watkin Tench, the best-known chronicler of early Sydney, noted in a July 1791 diary entry: “In the list of convicts brought out was George Barrington, of famous memory.” Evidently Tench thought no other name worth mentioning.

To the popular press back in England he was the noted Barrington, the celebrated Barrington, the famous, the ingenious, the notorious Barrington. He was dubbed the Prince of Pickpockets. He was a topical reference point for ballads, novels and plays and his name was invoked in contemporary political debates.

None of the many chapbooks and travel narratives that appeared under the name of George Barrington was written by him—the name was simply used by unscrupulous publishers as an authorial brand once the man himself had been transported to a place too far away for him to be able to object.

As a professional criminal, Barrington had no use for publicity and indeed the notoriety he gained as a gentleman thief—desired and reviled, recognised and suspected wherever he went—eventually prevented him from practising his trade and finally contributed to him being convicted and transported.

In Australia, Barrington achieved a measure of actual respectability denied him at home. By all accounts he behaved well—even if he had felt the urge, there were no pockets worth picking in a penal colony—and was quickly given a full pardon and positions of trust. Within a few short years he was appointed to the position of Chief Constable of Parramatta.

Perhaps celebrity, which is a kind of secular idolatry, had something to do with Barrington’s rehabilitation. Perhaps he was a big fish in a small pond, like so many others who have moved from the British Isles to Australia. Perhaps he was one of the few people in the new colony at that time who could talk posh. Perhaps, in the end, there is no difference between reality and sustained pretence.

All we really know for certain about Barrington is the magnitude of his fame. Everyone was talking about him but his inner life remains a mystery. We don’t know exactly when and where he was born, and it seems George Barrington was not even his real name.

Simon Caterson’s Hoax Nation: Australian Fakes and Frauds, from Plato to Norma Khouri was published last November by Arcade Publications of Melbourne.