Publications | Down Survey | 1999 Issue Contents

David Haggart the murderer
Gordon Wheeler

Before the advent of the modern tabloid newspaper, the all-too-human but regrettable craving for vicarious excitements and sensational reportage was satisfied by a thriving street literature. In the later nineteenth century it took the form of affordable and basically produced 'penny dreadful' fiction issued in numerous serial parts. Preceding this, and with a long tradition stretching back into the seventeenth century, more innocent and simple tastes had been supplied by an enormous corpus of popular ballads which were published, often without printer's name or place of printing, as narrow flimsy paper strips, almost invariably carrying a single crude woodcut illustration, to be sold in the streets for a halfpenny or less. Eventually collections of the texts of such ballads were made up into small convenient short pamphlets or chapbooks, so called because they were sold by chapmen or hawkers. These, together with many other favourites in the reading matter of the common man, were produced, often in vast editions, using the cheapest of paper and type, and earned fortunes in the early nineteenth century for London printers such as James Cartrach and John Pitts, or for distributors like Luke White, one of the wealthiest booksellers in Dublin, who had started life as a chapman.

Aynsworth Pilson in his unpublished 'Miscellaneous essays chiefly relating to Downpatrick' provides a description of ballad sales in Downpatrick in the late eighteenth century: "Ballads were in much request and were purchased and read by the younger people. They were ... put into circulation by professional ballad singers who traversed the street with thick folds of them over their left arm, whilst the right hand extended to the purchaser the literary condiments, receiving at the same
time the half-penny, which was dropped into a capacious purse placed in front of the performer."

Crime and execution ballads were the most popular of all: a streetseller confided to Henry Mayhew, the mid nineteenth-century social historian of London's low life, "There's nothing beats a stunning good murder after all." The format of such ballads was fairly standard: usually a relation in prose of the criminal's wrong-doings, followed by verses supposedly written by the condemned man on the night before he met his end. (Longer accounts were published in chapbook form, and subsequently many of these and of the ballads found their way into the parts of the serially issued Newgate Calerrdar which made up three substantial volumes between 1824 and 1828 and which for long remained extremely popular in a succession of editions). One single broadside street, The confession and execution of the murderer of the unfortunate Maria Marten, is reputed to have sold 1 million copies!

In Ireland accounts of crimes and of last dying speeches were similarly best sellers in ballad, broadside and chapbook form. Some of the nineteenth-century titles in the Madden collection of Irish ballads in Carnbridge University Library give the flavour of the content - 'The bodysnatcher's downfall', 'Elegy on the brutal poisoning of Father Maguire', 'The execution of Bernard Cangley', 'The gallant escape of Pat MeCarthy', 'The last speech of the genuine Billy Barlow', 'The murder of Anne O'Brien', 'A new song on the banishment of Patrick Brady', 'Sligo Gaol', 'The trial of Black Robin'. The most immensely successful chapbooks with lasting local appeal from the late eighteenth century onwards were

The life and adventures of David Haggart the murderer with an account of his execution, published in Belfast in 1843 and a copy of which is in our museum collection, belongs to a slightly different category of chapbook from those described above. During the ten years or so spanning the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, Hannah More, the
prolific religious writer, brought out a steady stream of 'Cheap Repository Tracts' in chapbook form and distributed by the Association for Discountenancing Vice. These frequently contained moral and uplifting tales of reformed backsliders. Why the life of an obscure Scottish pick-pocket and gaol-breaker such as David Haggart should have been selected for publication in Belfast some twenty years after his execution might seem puzzling other than for the salutary lesson that can be drawn from his apparent penitence.