#train them young

[pampelushka]

5 year old: mom, who do you like better? boys or girls?

my bisexual ass: both, honey, i like both

7 year old: no! she must like boys better because she married dad and now she has two boys - you and me

[theoutcastrogue]

The Card Trick (1880-1889)

Bluffing (1885)

by John George Brown (American genre painter, 1831-1913)

[aleximedicusa]

tbh as much as he would love to be a dad maybe it’s best lewis isn’t one because the sheer amount of times he’s probably let his nieces and nephews get away with reckless shit is astronomical

[88thparallel]

Mommy, Smaug thinks John - no, wait... I mean... Smaug thinks BILBO is delicious!

My 3 year old, who I have never been so proud of

[theoutcastrogue]

"At the end of Nonesuch Street was a gibbet, where wrongdoers – or, at least, people found guilty of wrongdoing - had been hung to twist gently in the wind as examples of just retribution and, as the elements took their toll, basic anatomy as well.

Once, parties of children were brought there by their parents to learn by dreadful example of the snares and perils that await the criminal, the outlaw and those who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they would see the terrible wreckage creaking on its chain and listen to the stern imprecations and then usually (this being Ankh-Morpork) would say 'Wow! Brilliant!' and use the corpse as a swing.

These days the city had more private and efficient ways of dealing with those it found surplus to requirements, but for the sake of tradition the gibbet's incumbent was a quite realistic wooden body. The occasional stupid raven would have a peck at the eyeballs even now, and end up with a much shorter beak."

— Terry Pratchett, Feet of Clay

[theoutcastrogue]

Luis Menéndez Pidal, El Lazarillo de Tormes (1900)

Théodule Ribo, Lazarillo de Tormes et son maître aveugle (1870s)

Francisco de Goya, Lazarillo de Tormes (1820)

Luis Santamaría y Pizarro, Lazarillo de Tormes (1887)

Lazarillo de Tormes, Francisco de Goya, España, 1810

Sátira sobre la miseria.

Romanticismo

Literatura

Técnica: Óleo ( 80 x 65 cm.)

Escrito por: Miguel Calvo Santos

Realizada durante la Guerra de la Independencia contra Francia (y por tanto época en la que Goya tenía pocos encargos), esta obra representa una escena del famoso y atemporal libro Lazarillo de Tormes.

Francisco de Goya oscurece su paleta, pero deja ver —gracias a la luz de las llamas de la derecha— al ciego metiendo los dedos en la garganta de su lazarillo para asegurarse de que no se ha comido una longaniza (dejándole a él con un simple nabo). Por supuesto, el pícaro no le pudo dar gato por liebre a su jefe, y acabó vomitando el manjar, aunque como vemos, está dispuesto a pasar la incomodidad de la inspección bucal con tal de haber podido saciar su hambre miserable.

Porque la miseria es la auténtica protagonista del cuadro, como lo era del libro. Miseria física, moral, y por supuesto social. De ahí esos personajes harapientos, grotescos, absolutamente caricaturescos, que viven en la penumbra de un país en el que cada cual busca su aprovechamiento sin pensar en los otros.

La obra, como podemos observar, preludia la oscuridad cromática y temática de las que serían sus fascinantes Pinturas Negras, con las que Goya decoraría su casa en sus tiempos más oscuros.

[x]

[theoutcastrogue]

"PICKING OF POCKETS. This way of obtaining the property of others, is certainly the most genteel, profitable, and alluring of any, because it requires some degree of ingenuity to exercise it properly, and a great deal of address and firmness to get off without detection. Professors of the art are admired for their dexterity, by everyone but the immediate losers; and people laugh at the droll way in which the sufferers relate how they were done."

— The London Guide for Strangers

"The London Guide for Strangers was first published in 1819 [...] It really needs no further introduction, except to say, that the methods used by criminals on the unwary had not changed much in the two centuries since Green described them in The Complete Cony-Catching; and probably have not changed much in our day, another two centuries later."

— Ex-Classics, a site that's a great source for early modern rogues, republishing old books in PDF and epub format with introductions, notes and everything. Here's their subject index.

From the 16th century onward, there were many books and leaflets warning law-abiding citizens about the dangers of the criminal underworld, especially London's. But ever so often, amid the moral panics, the sensationalism, and the vilification of law-breakers and outsiders of all kinds, admiration seeped through, like in the above excerpt about ingenious and dexterous pickpockets. Basically, writers and publishers did the song and dance where they pretended to write about criminals in order to WARN or EDUCATE or ADMONISH the public, but in their heart of hearts everyone knew that, according to the public, criminals are cool actually.

And that's largely how English rogue literature worked all these centuries. Like 1950s crime fiction and comics: CRIME!!!! (big letters) doesn't pay (tiny font).

But I don't want to play down the vilification part, which was always front and centre. So here's a picture worth a thousand words from that same book, the 1819 London Guide for Strangers:

The caption is "Example of early depravity". What we're looking at is three children pickpocketing a woman. The method is well attested: a child (or a short person) gets underfoot someone in the crowd, makes them lose their balance and trip over towards an accomplice who'll try to draw their attention ("oh dear, are you alright?" or "oi! watch it!"), and in the confusion another accomplice will dive for their handkerchief, watch, pocketbook etc., before they all meld into the crowd again.

So look how that's depicted: not in a crowd, giving the impression that the victim could fall over and get seriously hurt (that never happened, the crowd was crucial to the whole set up, and one person's job was literally to catch the victim). It looks very violent, which it wasn't. The victim is a terrified young woman, and in contrast to her innocence, the children look mean and vicious, their heads drawn larger than the adult's.

And they called that "early depravity". You know what's depraved, mate? Making your industrial revolution with the hard labour of eight-year-olds in the mills and mines — forced labour in most cases (and in all cases of orphans and delinquents). Picking pockets instead is an improvement.

[theoutcastrogue]

Crime books, comics and other stories packed with criminal activity and presented in such a way as to glorify crime and the criminal may be dangerous, particularly in the hands of an unstable child. A comic book which is replete with the lurid and macabre; which places the criminal in a unique position by making him a hero; which makes lawlessness attractive; which ridicules decency and honesty; which leaves the impression that graft and corruption are necessary evils of American life; which depicts the life of the criminal as exciting and glamorous may influence the susceptible boy or girl who already possesses anti-social tendencies.

FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, at the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in 1950, being entirely unoriginal and of course entirely wrong

cited in Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (University Press of Mississippi, 2005)