Free Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson Page A

under the eyes of older relatives or friends already skilled in the art, aspiring to rise to the status of "masters of the trade ... versing upon all men with kind courtesies and fair words, and yet being so warily watchful." They worked in teams, with a carefully worked-out division of labor. One or more stalls (decoys) would lure a cony or a cully (the victim) into a position to be robbed by a foin or a nip. The foins were the elite practitioners, who prided themselves on their dexterity and their ability to distract their victims while they reached into a pocket; the lower-status nips merely slashed and grabbed. Either way, the stolen purse went to the snap, who usually lurked behind or next to the foin or nip, who could then melt into the background.
    Shoplifters had a similar battery of tasks divided among gang members. The mask distracted the shopkeeper while the lift grabbed the goods and passed them on to a receiver, or santar, who never entered the store and therefore could not, in theory, be tied to the robbery. Confidence tricks, loaded dice, rigged card games, and the like required similar networks of conspirators. Burglars learned from confederates how to pick locks. Fences, at the hub of criminal commerce, provided a clearinghouse for training, job leads, refuges, and alibis.
    In this society of crime, a lone man or woman, unskilled, without friends, known to none of its gentry, would have found it almost intolerably dangerous to attempt a freelance rampage. Chaloner was too smart to try. Instead, he drifted to the hungry fringes of city life until he could find a way to its gilded center.
    It took him only a few months, and the path he found earned him scandalized admiration from his biographer, who wrote, "The first part of his Ingenuity showed it self in making Tin Watches, with D—does &c in 'em." These Chaloner "hawk'd about the Streets, and therby pick'd up a few loose Pence, and looser associates."
    That is, Chaloner's first attempt to rise above mere subsistence turned him into a purveyor of sex toys. London in the 1690s was as famous, or perhaps notorious, for its spirit of sexual innovation as Berlin would be in the 1920s. Prostitution was ubiquitous, as much a part of the life of the wealthy as it was that of the poor, who supplied most of the trade's workers. The best brothels vied to outdo each other in their range of offerings—so much so that Dr. John Arbuthnot, a man about town in the early eighteenth century, apparently spoke for many when he told a madam at one of the better houses, "a little of your plain fucking for me if you please!"
    Anything a cultivated lecher might covet could be had: erotica in words and pictures, ribald songs, and lewd performances. Perhaps the most obscene work of theater ever composed comes from this period, the scabrous play
Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery,
attributed to the notorious libertine John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Written in or around 1672, the play may be a disguised attack on Charles II (with whom Wilmot shared at least one mistress). Its description of a monarch attempting to promote sodomy throughout his kingdom has been interpreted as a coded denunciation of the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, which pronounced official toleration of Catholicism. If that was the author's intention, the polemic comes very well disguised within its wildly ribald plot.
    For those whom literary debauches did not satisfy, a market for sexual aids flourished. As early as 1660, just two years after Cromwell's death, which resulted in the decline of Puritanism, there were reports of imported Italian dildos being sold on St. James's Street. Homegrown entrepreneurs also sought to profit, although it remains something of a mystery just what Chaloner was trying to peddle. That his devices demonstrated "the first part of his ingenuity" suggests that they were more than mere knockoff phalluses. They probably were not true watches either. The technology of