Posterity², in calling over its muster-roll of famous men, has refused to fulfil this pious³ hope, and Charley Peace stands out as the one great personality among English criminals of the nineteenth century. In Charley Peace alone is revived that good-humoured popularity which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries fell to the lot of Claude Duval, Dick Turpin and Jack⁵ Sheppard. But Peace has one grievance⁶ against posterity; he has endured one humiliation⁷ which these heroes have been spared. His name has been omitted from the pages of the "Dictionary of National Biography." From Duval, in the seventeenth, down to the Mannings, Palmer, Arthur Orton, Morgan and Kelly, the bushrangers, in the nineteenth century, many a criminal, far less notable or individual than Charley Peace, finds his or her place in that great record of the past achievements of our countrymen. Room has been denied to perhaps the greatest and most naturally gifted criminal England has produced, one whose character is all the more remarkable⁸ for its modesty⁹, its entire freedom from that vanity and vaingloriousness so common among his class.

 

The only possible reason that can be suggested for so singular an omission¹⁰ is the fact that in the strict order of alphabetical¹¹ succession the biography of Charles Peace would have followed immediately on that of George Peabody. It may have been thought that the contrast was too glaring, that even the

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