5.12: Dick Turpin’s first highway robbery! — The Swedish count who tried to woo a wife by murdering her husband. — A very naughty song about spoon-making! (Twopenny Torrids segment)

SHOW NOTES

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EPISODES 12

(The second of four aired on February 15, 2026)

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Join host Corinthian Finn, a.k.a. Finn J.D. John 18th Baron Dunwitch,* for a one-hour-long spree through the scandal-sheets and story papers of old London!

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"THE TWOPENNY TORRIDS" SEGMENT:

• 00:40: THE LIVES OF THE HIGHWAYMEN: The affair of Count Koenigsmark, a feisty Swedish nobleman who in 1682 tried to murder his way into the good graces of a 13-year-old heiress, and barely got out of the country unhanged ….
• 12:13: BLACK BESS; or, THE KNIGHT OF THE ROAD (starring HIGHWAYMAN DICK TURPIN), Chapter 54: Turpin continues the story of his first heist. After it was over, he tried to go back to honest work; but he found nobody would hire him, so back he went upon the road! Also, Dick tells how he became the owner of his amazing mare, Black Bess.
• 24:20: STREET POETRY: From a broadside ballad: The Young Woman’s ABC (a delightfully flirty bit of fun in the vein of Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5”) on the same page as a deeply moving ballad of a Maryland man whose (free) Black wife was kidnapped by a gang of “fugitive slave catchers.” (1860).
• 30:45: A RATHER NAUGHTY COCK-AND-HEN-CLUB SONG: "The Metal Spoon-makers” (about sex, of course; what else?)
• 33:00: A FEW MILDLY DIRTY JOKES from what passed in 1830 for a dirty joke book: "The Joke-Cracker" by Martin Merryman, Esq.

GLOSSARY OF FLASH TERMS USED IN THIS EPISODE:

• KNIGHT OF THE BLADE: A swaggering braggadocio.
• BLUNT: Money, with the implication that there is a lot of it.
• RHINO: Same as “blunt.”
• BULLY ROCKS: Cheap muscle, usually a reference to “protection” men in a whorehouse.
• BOLT THE MOON: Fly by night.

* The Barony of Dunwitch is located in a deep forest glade west of Arkham (where, as H.P. Lovecraft put it, “the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut; there are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight.”) Actually it is a good 3,000 miles west of Arkham. It is not to be confused with Dunwich, the English seacoast town that fell house by house into the sea centuries ago, or Dunsany, the home until 1957 of legendary fantasy author Edward J.M.D. Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany.