There are times when a small discovery, made almost by chance, opens a door upon a world one had not expected to enter. Such was the beginning of this book.
Some years ago, while working at the Cantium Museum at Canterbury, I came across a small printed pamphlet, published in 1789, bearing the imposing title John Kirby: A Sketch of the Life of that notorious House-Breaker, Horse-Stealer, and Highway Robber. It purported to give an account of his life and adventures, related by the man himself while awaiting transportation for seven years. The pamphlet was offered to the public at sixpence, and its successive editions suggest that there were many who wished to read the story of this Kentish rogue.
I confess that I began reading it with the expectation of finding little more than a catalogue of offences, perhaps enlivened by the customary exaggerations of a man anxious to make himself appear more remarkable than he truly was. I was not entirely disappointed in that expectation. Yet, as I turned its pages, I found myself increasingly interested in the man behind the crimes.
John Kirby was no great villain of history. He commanded no army, held no office, and took no part in the affairs of state. He was born in Blean, among the lanes and fields of Kent, and lived among ordinary people whose names and occupations might otherwise have passed unnoticed by posterity. He stole from neighbours, employers and strangers; he was repeatedly imprisoned, and more than once contrived to escape the consequences of his actions. He could be audacious, boastful and remarkably ingenious. At times he appears almost amused by his own cleverness. At others, his conduct reveals a carelessness towards the lives and livelihoods of those whom he injured.
I found it impossible either to admire him without reservation or to dismiss him as a creature wholly without feeling. There are glimpses, here and there, of a more complicated nature: a young man capable of earning an honest living, yet repeatedly drawn back towards the company and habits that brought him to ruin. Whether he ever seriously desired to reform himself is a question to which the pamphlet provides no certain answer. It is one of the many questions that remain with the reader after the final page.
There was another reason why I could not put the little book aside. The names and places belonged to a countryside familiar to me. Blean, Canterbury, Harbledown, Whitstable and the villages beyond them were not distant or imaginary settings, but places whose histories I had long been accustomed to explore. The people whom Kirby robbed were not merely entries in a criminal record. They were men and women who had lived, worked, worried over their households and hoped to protect what they possessed. Their lives, too, deserved to be remembered.
The pamphlet, however, is a curious and imperfect guide. It was written under unusual circumstances, by a condemned prisoner who knew that his account might be read by the very public among whom he had committed his offences. Its language of repentance sits uneasily beside the relish with which some of his adventures are described. We cannot be certain that every word was written by Kirby’s own hand, nor can we assume that every incident is presented exactly as it occurred. The printed account is valuable, but it is not the whole truth.
It was this realisation that led me to attempt the present work.
I have not wished to produce another transcription of Kirby’s pamphlet, nor to present a dry record of his criminal proceedings. Such a task would have added little to what is already known. Instead, I have sought to place the surviving account within the world in which its author lived: the farms and cottages of eighteenth-century Kent, the public houses and market streets of Canterbury, the roads along which he travelled, and the gaols in which he was confined.
Where the pamphlet provides an incident, I have endeavoured to give it life. Where it is silent, I have sometimes allowed imagination to supply what the passage of time has taken from us. Conversations, private thoughts and many of the smaller circumstances of the story are necessarily my own invention. I have not pretended to know what Kirby thought at every turn, nor have I wished to conceal the distinction between the evidence of the old account and the liberties of the novelist.
The reader should therefore regard this work as a historical novel founded upon an authentic eighteenth-century pamphlet, rather than as a strictly biographical account. The principal events and the broad course of Kirby’s life are drawn from the surviving record; the scenes through which they are presented have, of necessity, been imagined.
In writing it, I have found myself considering not only the man who committed the offences, but the world that formed him. No person is entirely separate from the circumstances of his birth, his upbringing, his companions or his opportunities. Yet circumstances cannot absolve a man of responsibility for the harm he does to others. Jack Kirby was a product of his time, as we all are of ours; but he was also a man who made choices, and whose choices carried consequences.
I have sometimes wondered what Kirby would have thought of finding his life once more in print, more than a century after he first offered it to the public. Would he have been pleased that anyone remembered him? Would he have recognised the young man I have attempted to portray? Or would he have objected to the parts of his character that I have allowed the reader to see?
We cannot ask him.
But perhaps that is one of the privileges of the historical novelist: to return, for a little while, to those whose voices have long been silent, and to consider the lives that lie behind the names in our records.
I offer this book, then, not in defence of John Kirby, but in the hope that his story may be read with interest and with some understanding of the ordinary human circumstances from which an extraordinary life of wrongdoing emerged.
Jemima Hartford
Canterbury, 1913
Part One – A Boy from Blean
Chapter One – The Forest and the Village