Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew, King of the Beggars

Who would have thought that the autobiography of an 18th-century professional beggar would prove more entertaining than any novel of manners? Bampfylde Moore Carew, real-life 'King of the Beggars,' was so brilliant at extracting coin from the English gentry that he became a legend in his own time. His method: elaborate disguises, shipwrecked sailor, grieving widow clutching borrowed infants, clergyman down on his luck, combined with an encyclopedic knowledge of foreign ports and personages that made his lies impossibly plausible. What elevates Carew beyond mere criminality is his perverse psychology. He delighted in returning to the same mark weeks later under an entirely different identity, testing whether gullibility was truly infinite. Sometimes, after the con, he would unmask himself and drink with his victim, a bizarre honesty that blurs the line between trickster and entertainer. Twice caught and transported to colonial America, twice he escaped or returned. This is picaresque fiction in its purest form: a true rogue's manual that reads like the greatest con artist story never written, because it actually happened.