I have added a new post to the Copy Book, One More Pounce. It is a scene from the life of Dorset-born highwayman Tom Dorbel (?-1714). Tom’s reckless career was told for us by Captain Charles Johnson (widely thought to be a pseudonym) in one of his series of books on sensational criminals of the early eighteenth century.
This particular story presented a problem, in that it involves a Welshman and Johnson attempted to give us his lines in dialect. The result was both grating and difficult to understand, so I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing the story, preserving the flavour of Johnson’s original as best I could.
As described by Johnson, Dorbel was violent, cunning and thoroughly unrepentant, not one of those gentlemanly highwaymen such as we met in A Corant On the Heath, so it is gratifying to see him get his comeuppance.