Defoe Masters the Serial Subject

Abstract

When Mary Carleton was indicted on January 15, 1673 for the theft of a silver cup and spoon, a crime which ended her career as a thief at Tyburn, two indictments were drafted and filed in the Sessions Records. One indictment identifies her as Carlston wife of John Carlston alias Maria Spinster while the other more complex indictment identifies her with a longer catalogue of names: Carlston wife of John Carlston, Maria Spinster, Maria Kirton, Maria Modders.' What is more, a jail delivery list dated January 15, 1673 in State Papers adds yet another appellation to Carleton's serial identity when it identifies her as Carlston als. German Princess.2 The catalogue of names frequently found in early modem indictments would seem to be an unwieldy means of identifying offenders, but before the late eighteenth century when, at Sir John Fielding's request, records began to be kept providing reliable information as to the criminal antecedents of every offender it was the only means.3 Before a criminal had a record which was, in essence, an authoritative biography, the indictment was the sole discursive site for provisionally establishing a subject's legal identity and history. Because indictments were filed in different jurisdictions at different moments in time, the fragmentary nature of a criminal's record prior to the eighteenth century made agency possible as a kind of loophole. Each appearance before an official (justice, recorder, or judge) offered the criminal opportunity to rewrite her personal history if she wanted to keep living. Indictments, particularly of female offenders, construct the criminal's identity as a series of names (and by implication, a series of lives), making visible the process by which marginalized subjects could claim a degree of agency, however circumscribed, within seventeenthcentury historical and juridical process. Criminal indictments reveal an early modern discursive formation in which socially marginal individuals were able to construct themselves in a series of narrative responses to determinate (often life-threatening)