Charlotte Walker

Charlotte Walker was a prostitute and pickpocket who had a long and eventful career in the St Giles area of London.1 Over a twenty-four year period, Charlotte appeared twelve times to answer charges at the Old Bailey, mainly simple grand larceny or pickpocketing, and yet she was convicted only once. An additional fifteen arrests for felony were noted in the sessions books, three of which were reported in The Times. She was also arrested for assault and for being disorderly on a number of occasions, and once for being a vagrant. According to the Criminal Register of the Felons in Newgate for 1800,2 compiled by Edward Raven, a clerk in the Home Department, Charlotte Walker came from Liverpool, was 46 years old, 4'11" tall, possessed a fair complexion and light hair, and had lived lately in the parish of St Clement Danes. She was certainly living in London by February 1776 when she was accused of assault,3 but her first Old Bailey court appearance, for theft, did not occur until 3 December 1777 when she was about 23 years old. This was the first of eleven acquittals. She had been careless in taking a watch from a conscious victim, and maybe the jury found the idea of anyone wanting to go home with an elderly prostitute implausible. However the changing patterns of criminal record keeping also played a role. Under "Remarks" in the Criminal Register for February 1798 she is described as "a very old offender" who "has been tried several times". Her past had caught up with her, and this time there was no escape. Charlotte’s death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. She boarded the ship, the Nile, which set sail in June 1801 for New South Wales, arriving in Sydney on 14 December 1801. She died there in November 1806.4 But Charlotte's intriguing life had one final twist. According to the Sydney Gazette, she died "of an apoplexy", and "in consequence of unpleasant rumours being circulated relative to the circumstances of her death, her husband was apprehended and kept in custody, until yesterday liberated by the verdict of a coroner's inquest".