The English Rogue: Continued in the Life of Meriton Latroon, and Other Extravagants, Comprehending the Most Eminent Cheats of Both Sexes: The Third Part

The Restoration era's most notorious banned book, printed in secret and sold furtively at alehouses before its official 1665 license. Richard Head's picaresque epic follows Meriton Latroon and a rotating cast of thieves, seducers, and swindlers through a world where every transaction is a con and every virtue has a price. The novel opens with Dorothy, a masterful manipulator who keeps three lovers financing her pregnancy simultaneously, spinning lies with the casual dexterity of a spider tending multiple webs. This is 17th-century England as a marketplace of bodies and cash, where survival means outwitting your neighbors and morality is merely another racket. The text influenced every con artist narrative that followed, from Moll Flanders to Catch Me If You Can. It remains a fascinating time capsule of Restoration vice and the era's anxieties about social mobility, gender, and the slippery nature of truth.