Jane and the Five Finger Discount
No, this is not an upcoming title in the Jane Austen Mysteries series (at least as far as we know). The Los Angeles Times has an article about celebrity shoplifting that included a bit about Jane Austen’s aunt, Mrs. Leigh Perrot, who stood trial for stealing lace. Had she been convicted, she could have been hanged or transported to Australia.
With the rise of the middle class, shoplifting spread. A sensational trial occurred in 1800 — l’affaire Winona Ryder of its day — when the police arrested Jane Austen’s aunt, Leigh Perrot, in Bath for stealing lace. After spending seven months in jail, Perrot was acquitted in a few minutes by a jury that felt she had already been too harshly punished. A few years later, Henry Mayhew, the chronicler of Victorian crime, noted, “We find ladies in respectable positions occasionally charged with shoplifting.”
We were under the impression that the jury simply found that there was not enough evidence that the lace was stolen rather than planted on the lady’s person; apparently the shopkeepers had a plan to extort money from the Leigh Perrots in return for dropping the charges.
